![]() At 4 inches (10 cm) long and 2.3 inches (6 cm) wide, the broken chomper is twice as wide as the previous record-holder for ichthyosaur teeth, which came from a beast nearly 50 feet (15 m) long. "Biology textbook have long touted the modern blue whale as the largest animal that ever lived, but this and other fascinating fossil finds hint that there may once have been even bigger creatures swimming Earth's seas," National Geographic wrote about the 2018 find.Ī tooth unearthed in the Swiss Alps in 2022 hints at an even bigger ichthyosaur. ![]() (Image credit: Illustration by Stephanie Abramowicz, courtesy of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM).) today’s sperm whale, with human for scale. ![]() By comparison, blue whales come in at 80 to 100 feet (24 to 30 m) long.Ī direct comparison of two ocean giants from different epochs side by side: The Triassic ichthyosaurs vs. That's 25% larger than the previous, 69-foot-long record holder. In 2018, scientists reported finding fragments of a massive, 3.1-foot-long (96 cm) ichthyosaur jawbone, which scales up to hint at a body that would have measured approximately 85 feet (26 m) or more. A more recent discovery suggests that some ichthyosaurs rivaled blue whales in size. Shonisaurus popularis and others could exceed 50 feet (15 m) long, Motani wrote, while a 2004 specimen reached an estimated 69 feet (21 m) in length. Some measured under 3 feet (1 m) long, while the Chaohusaurus geishanensis species was likely smaller than 28 inches (70 centimeters) long and some species could be as tiny as 1 foot (0.3 m) long.īut by the late Triassic period, several ichthyosaur species attained great size, Britannica said. The general ichthyosaur length ranged from 3 to 65 feet (1 to 20 m), with an average length of 6.5 to 13 feet (2 to 4 m). Most ichthyosaurs were much smaller than their biggest cousins, such as several species of Ichthyosaurus found in the United Kingdom stretching just 5 to 11 feet (1.5 to 3 m). The representative Ichthyosaurus genus, which gives the larger group its name, spanned about 10 feet (3 m) long on average and looked very fish-like, according to Britannica. By comparison, whales plodded along for 90% of their 55 million years before getting so large. But the enormous creature appeared only about 2.5 million years after ichthyosaurs' debut, or within 1% of their 150 million years on the planet. A newfound species, Cymbospondylus youngorum, would have stretched more than 55 feet (17 meters) long based on extrapolations from its 6.5-foot-long (2 m) skull, scientists reported in the journal Science. Ichthyosaurs also took an evolutionary fast-track to achieve their great size, researchers reported in 2021. This 130 million-year-old ichthyosaur was a 'hypercarnivore' with knife-like teeth The world's largest ichthyosaur may have just been discovered in the Swiss Alps Meet 'Fiona' the pregnant ichthyosaur, Chile's oldest marine reptile mom "These ichthyosauriforms seem to have evolved very quickly, in short bursts of lots of change, in leaps and bounds," Rieppel said in a statement about the find. That odd design signaled that "ichthyosauriforms evolved and diversified rapidly," said Olivier Rieppel, a curator of evolutionary biology at The Field Museum in Chicago. The ichthyosaur described in the study, Sclerocormus parviceps, had an atypical anatomy, with a toothless, stubby snout that it may have used to suck up food. A 2016 study describing an early ichthyosaur suggested that the group first appeared after the end-Permian mass extinction - Earth's greatest mass extinction, which occurred about 251.9 million years ago - and then quickly diversified into new forms. ![]() However ichthyosaurs originated, recent studies have shown that they burst onto the scene, evolutionarily speaking. Or they may come from a distant turtle relative. They may constitute an offshoot of the diapsid, a large group of related organisms that also includes dinosaurs, birds and snakes. That hyperspecialization to the sea makes pinning down ichthyosaurs' lineage challenging, according to the University of California Museum of Paleontology (UCMP). A photo of an ichthyosaur fossil at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.
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