Ichthyotitan, the Largest Ichthyosaur Ever Found
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 26 เม.ย. 2024
- Ichthyotitan is a massive new genus of ichthyosaur from the Triassic of England. With a single skull bone measuring over 2m (6ft) in length it was potentially the largest ichthyosaur to have ever lived, and shows just how wild the oceans of the Triassic were.
It's dangerous to go alone, check out our Links!
Patreon: www.patreon.com/raptorchatter
Twitter: raptor_chatter
Redbubble: www.redbubble.com/people/RaptorChatter/shop
Discord: / discord - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
What's amazing about this find is that it was discovered by amateur fossil hunters. Great job! And quite inspiring. Hope we find more of this specimen
it would be cool to see in a documentary one of these things exploding after dying like what whales do today. basically, a segment like the Alamosaurus death in the second season of Prehistoric planet except a little more graphic. I mean who does not want to see how many Triassic animals would come to an Ichthyosaur carcass.
Big! Potentially really big. Cannot wait for further research. Exciting find and study. Thanks Raptor chatter
Nice video thanks
nice video
Aust colossus was still larger, and both aust and ichyotitan were still growing. Even the sub adult Aust was larger than the blue whale from third party estimates. Sadly no official estimates have been released on the Aust specimen.
It seems to me like they would need more specimens of at least Ichthyotitan to start making those esitimates. Ichthyotitan size estimates are themselves based on much smaller animals so assuming that these size relationships are linear across such a huge size diversity does not seem likely. Just look at whales. If you only had complete smaller whales and dolphins to go by, you might assume that Sperm whale and Right whales were MUCH larger than they really are if you only looked at the jaw bones. Because some whales have this interesting thing happening where they have proportionally larger heads than their bodies. Right whales have I think the largest head in proportion to their body of any other mammal, and most vertebrates. So if you found a Right whale jaw you might assume an animal twice to three times the actual size. So without a much more complete Ichthyotitan it seems pointless to guess about Aust. But maybe thats just me.
It’s safe to assume all those estimates are way too large, we need a lot more specimens before we can make any estimates that actually might be accurate to the size of the real animal. It’s been proven countless times that just using smaller somewhat related species to scale the size of a much larger species with more fragmentary remains almost never gives an accurate size estimate.
@@Dell-ol6hb I’d have to disagree. The estimates are actually quite comprehensive. Now the jaws seem to be similar to those of shastasaurus, which we have much more complete estimates of, and scaling up those get massive estimates.
@@Nethercroc14 key word being “seem”, it means little until we have more complete specimens, otherwise it’s just guessing that the animals have similar proportions when they could easily be very different, we don’t even have a skull for Icthyotitan, it’s fine to speculate but any estimates now are likely to be incorrect once more evidence is gathered and analyzed, we’ve seen this many times with newly described and analyzed fossils, paleontologists love to make a huge estimate in size with gigantic animals which eventually gets reduced significantly as new studies are published. I mean we’ll see what happens and I might very well be wrong, but I’m pretty confident that this is quite an excessive estimate.
@@Dell-ol6hb I love the skepticism, and prehistoric animals aren’t necessarily my area of expertise, but I’m quite confident in the larger sizes of these animals. Even though these remains are highly fragmentary, that doesn’t necessarily stop us from producing some very accurate estimates. I’m certain that the estimates will change in some way shape or form, but I doubt they will undergo a substantial decrease or increase. I respect your opinion however. The estimates for these animals have actually been around for a couple years now, and have barely changed. These estimates aren’t new, what’s new is the description of a new species.
A blue whale is currently threatening the researchers, gently telling them to reduce the size
It's really way too partial to know anything for certain. Would there have been teeth further forward in the jaw? And if no teeth are ever found, do we have to conclude that it was a suction feeder, or is there even a possibility of some structure that acts like baleen but doesn't preserve at all? Just the fact that there is such a huge jump in size of the jaw from the closest relatives suggests that these animals were doing something different.
And can we even reasonably make size estimates for these animals? Can we really assume that it will have the same proportions as Shastasaurus? This feels an awful lot like the problems with Dunk and Meg size estimates. We have such incredibly limited material that all we can say for sure it that Ichthyotitan and Aust represent the largest ichthyosaurs found... and the material seems to suggest that the examples we have were not fully grown... but beyond that? If we only had dolphins and orcas to go on what would we make of a partial Right whale jaw or a partial Blue whale jaw? Some kind of giant cetacean, but how big and doing what?
This is a classic thing where paleontologists greatly overestimate the size of an animal based on fragmentary remains and then later on the estimates are greatly reduced as more specimens are found and described. As you mentioned Megalodon and Dunkleosteus are perfect examples of this tendency
@@Dell-ol6hb It's all about bragging rights. I mean, it's cool to have these huge monsters, but the small critters are just as cool to me!
Because they have very under developed hyoid characteristic of suction feeders, ichthyosaurs, at least the ones we have material of, are not suction feeders.
@@vincentx2850 We don't have a single hyloid from any of these super large ichthyosaurs. All we have is these few sections of lower jaw. We can have a vague idea of what the animal is like, but the best we can really say about it is that is is *unlikely* that they were suction feeders, not that it is impossible. They are likely doing something different than their smaller relatives. What is it?
@@Dell-ol6hb Megalodon has been oversized in the past 10 yea-
Anyway uh no the remains are complete enough to determine size afaik.
Sorry I didn’t ask sooner but I have some footage of Aust Beach I got for vividen if you want to have it.
We have to bear in mind that when we talk about "potentially evolving very rapidly", we mean "within half to one million years", i.e. 25.000 to 50.000 generations (assuming a long life span for a large animal)...
Very fair. I think as more early fossils of different groups are found paleontology as a whole will start pivoting more towards that sort of idea.
Any thoughts on what they might taste like
Probably somewhat fishy, exact variation on that depending on what it tended to eat, but the texture would presumably be closer to crocodile or alligator, I'd expect.
If they did still exist, long John silvers would serve it on a combo plate
Hi. Has anyone come to any conclusion as to their closest relatives yet?
1:13 So you’re 5’9?
Then at 1.75 meters tall, a 2 meter long bone is a quarter of a meter taller than you.
yah i was confused by that too. 2 meters is basketball player height.
Yup. I should have been more clear about that. My dad is 6'2" and it's taller than him!
why don't we say atheosaurs are marine reptiles and dolphins look like them or do we say dolphin like atheosaurus it should be ethosaur like dolphins take these shirts around first remember.