The remains of a huge sea creature with huge teeth have been found in the Swiss Alps, which could help it catch giant squid.
Ichthyosaurs are large marine reptiles with an elongated snake shape. They first appeared after the end of the Permian extinction, an event also known as the “Great Dying”, which occurred about 250 million years ago and destroyed more than two-thirds of land and 96% of marine species.
The tooth beast is one of three giant ichthyosaurs found in the Swiss Alps and is thought to have lived in the late Triassic period, about 205 million years ago – potentially making them one of the last such giants.
The team said the findings helped solve the mystery of whether giant ichthyosaurs, like some smaller species, had teeth.
Professor Martin Sander of the University of Bonn, co-author of the study, said: “All this is very, very scarce evidence. We have these ghosts that have been floating in the late Triassic oceans for tens of millions of years, and we don’t know what they look like. This is a shame for paleontology.
“For a while we thought they had teeth. Then we thought we never found teeth. Now we have a giant tooth and a giant tooth. So some of them have teeth. “
Whale-sized ichthyosaurs are thought to have occasionally visited shallow waters. Photo: Janet Rueg / Heinz Führer / University of Zurich
Writing in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, the team describes how they discovered fossils of three giant ichthyosaurs at various locations in the Kössen formation between 1976 and 1990.
Fossil of one of the animals is an incomplete tooth 10 cm long. The team found a huge vertebra and fragments of ribs connected to another. The fossils of the third include seven large vertebrae. Sander said none of the remains appeared to be of known ichthyosaur species.
The team says the tooth, which lacks most of its crown, is only the second to come from a giant ichthyosaur and is the largest ever discovered for such a creature, surpassing those in a species known as the Himalayas, which was found in China and is believed to have had a body length of about 15 meters.
“Ichthyosaurs have a very distinctive tooth structure that can be seen in the root as well as in the crown,” Sander said, adding that the toothy giant found in the Alps may have eaten smaller ichthyosaurs and giant squid.
Sander said one of the creatures appeared to be about the same size as the Himalayas, while the other two, including the toothed beast, are probably similar in size to the giant ichthyosaur Shastasaur, a creature previously discovered in British Columbia that is about 21 meters long. about two lengths of a double-decker bus. “This skeleton had vertebrae the same diameter as those in the Alps,” Sander said.
But they are not the largest ichthyosaurs known to have lived. Among other finds, the toothless jawbone found in the Bristol Canal is thought to have belonged to an ichthyosaur that was about 26 meters long.
Shonizavr, another member of the Ichthyosaur genus from the Triassic period. Photo: Stocktrek Images / Alamy
As ichthyosaurs roam the oceans, the newly reported remains are buried in what was once a lagoon, suggesting the animals went into shallow water. “It’s kind of like the same problem when you get a sperm whale in the North Sea,” Sander said.
Dr Ben Moon, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol who was not involved, said the creatures may have entered shallow water to mate or give birth. He said the new report was exciting as there were few fossils of giant ichthyosaurs.
Dr Nick Fraser, a paleontologist at the National Museum of Scotland, said it was difficult to determine the size of a giant ichthyosaur based on a tooth alone, but the findings shed new light on reptiles.
“So far, we have suspected that most of the largest ichthyosaurs were toothless and sucker feeders,” he said, adding that the size of the newly reported tooth was stunning.
“The owner of that tooth shouldn’t have gotten involved,” Fraser said. “Along with the remains of vertebrae and ribs, there is really concrete evidence that in the past, Triassic waters sheltered some really massive ocean reptiles, probably as big as a living blue whale, and some probably had huge jaws armed with strong teeth. ”
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