An illustration of Cymbospondylus youngorum is in the ocean. Ammonites and squid were abundant in the ocean. The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County gave the image to us.
A sea monster that lived during the early dinosaur age is so large that it has a resemblance to a giant.
The new study suggests that the fish-shaped marine reptiles that inhabited the dinosaur-era seas grew to enormous sizes in 2.5 million years. The researchers said that it took whales about 90 percent of their 55 million-year history to reach the huge sizes that they do today.
At the end of themian period, when the world was recovering from devastating extinction, the world was able to evolve gigantism much faster than the dinosaurs. If environmental conditions are right, evolution can happen very fast, and life can bounce back, that is a sign of the resilience of life.
There are monsters of the sea.
In 1998 researchers noticed the ancient ichthyosaur's fossils embedded in the rocks of the Augusta Mountains of northwestern Nevada. The animal was large, but only a few of the bones were sticking out of the rock. They were able to get to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County with the help of a helicopter in 2015, after they excavated the individual, who had a skull, shoulder and flipper-like appendage.
The team named the new species Cymbospondylus youngorum. The marine reptile lived for over 200 million years ago. It was weird like other creatures from that time. "Imagine a sea-dragon-like animal with long limbs and a long tail, with a streamlined body and fins on its legs," said Schmitz. The researchers found that the full-grown C. youngorum was over 55 feet in length, or more than a semitrailer.
C. youngorum would have lived off the west coast of North America in the Panthalassic Ocean. He said that C. youngorum probably ate smaller fish and squid.
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The size of the newosaur is best illustrated with a human. The photo was taken by Martin Sander.
A volunteer is next to a skull. The photo was taken by Martin Sander.
The skull of the new species is well preserved and is over 6 feet long. The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County provided the photo.
The new giant species is one of the many irrthyosaurs found in the Fossil Hill fauna of Nevada. There are examples of the abundant fossils associated with the ichthyosaurs in this specimen. The photo was taken by the University of Bonn.
The new Ichthyosaur, Cymbospondylus youngorum, has an array of teeth. The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County provided the photo.
The skull of the new species is from the early Triassic period. The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County gave the photo to us.
C. youngorum is one of the biggest beasts that lived during the dinosaur era. The Great Dying, a mass extinction event that killed about 90% of the world's species, happened at the end of the Permian period. It took about 9 million years for life on Earth to recover from the extinction of the Ichthyosaur, according to a 2012 study.
The 2012 study found that there was a boom of ammonoids within 1 million to 3 million years of the mass extinction. The researchers of the new extinction found that the early boom of ammonites and jawless eel-like conodonts filled the ecological void after the mass extinction. The study's co-author, Eva Maria Griebeler, an evolutionary ecologist at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in Germany, said in a statement that whales got big by eating plankton, but these were absent in dinosaur-age food webs.
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The paper compares the two ocean giants from different eras, the Triassic Cymbopsondylus youngorum and the present day sperm whale. The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County gave the image to us.
Ichthyosaurs had larger body sizes than whales. The curves show the trajectory of the largest body size, expressed in percentage of the largest size ever reached. The curve for whales is much flatter than the curve for dinosaurs. The image is from the film "Lars Schmitz".
The fossils of the Ichthyosaur were flown out of the remote and rugged Augusta Mountains in Nevada. The photo was taken by Martin Sander.
The team conducted an excavation in the Augusta Mountains. The photo was taken by Lars Schmitz.
The photo was taken by Lars Schmitz.
The groups have a few similarities despite their different paths and timetables. There is a connection between large size and raptorial hunting, just like sperm whales dive to hunt giant squid, and there is a connection between large size and tooth loss, just like the giant filter-feeding whales that are toothless.
"This new fossil shows the evolution of gigantism in dinosaurs in a very short period of time," he said. The whales took a different route to gigantism.
"Ichthyosaur history tells us ocean giants are not guaranteed features of marine ecosystems, which is a valuable lesson for all of us in the Anthropocene," wrote Lene Delsett and Nicholas Pyenson, who weren't involved with the research.
Live Science published the original article.
