Earth’s first ocean giants were reptiles. During the Triassic, more than 201 million years ago, ichthyosaurs stalked the seas. Supreme predators, they were the orcas of their time. And now, paleontologists have identified what they believe could be the largest ichthyosaur ever discovered. With more than 30 meters in length, the Ichthyotitan severensis It was the sea monster of the dinosaurs.
The discovery began with an unusual fossil find several years ago. In 2018, paleontologist Dean Lomax described a piece of ichthyosaur bone. It was so big that it had been mistaken for a dinosaur bone. In 2020, a second piece of ichthyosaur jaw turned up in Somerset, England.
More than 24 meters
They confirmed that both giant bones belonged to the same huge species. Lomax and his colleagues described the fossils in a new paper published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE. The creature’s name is Ichthyotitan severensis.
There is no doubt that the animal was enormous only because of the two-meter-long jaw bones. The animal would have exceeded 24 meters in length. It is difficult to discover complete fossils of giant ichthyosaurs. “It could be due to their ecology and where they lived in the open sea,” explains Lomax. The bodies of these creatures would have been exposed to scavengers for longer. At least one of the jaws of Ichthyotitan shows signs of having been chewed before being buried.
There is increasing evidence that ichthyosaurs evolved into giant species within about eight million years after their appearance during the Triassic. Many of them were monstrous predators that hunted other marine reptiles. Almost as if they were giant orcas.
mass extinction
“Productive food networks must have existed to sustain them throughout the Triassic,” says Lomax. However, none of these giants survived the Triassic. Some later Jurassic ichthyosaurs were large, some even exceeding 9 meters in length. But none reached the size of the dinosaur sea monster.
He Ichthyotitan It was one of the last truly giant species before the devastating mass extinction 201 million years ago.
It happened due to incredible volcanic eruptions. They altered the global climate, the chemistry of the seas and much more. The ichthyosaurs as a group survived, but the giants did not. Sea creatures their size would not evolve again until whales began to get larger, more than 150 million years later.
