Jan.
7, 2013 — An international team of scientists has described a fossil
marine predator measuring 8.6 meters in length (about 28 feet) recovered from
the Nevada desert in 2010 as representing the first top predator in marine food
chains feeding on prey similar to its own size.
A
paper with their description will appear the week of Jan. 7, 2013 in the early
electronic issue of Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences.
Scientists
who studied the fossil include lead author Dr. Nadia Fröbisch and Prof. Jörg
Fröbisch (both at Museum für Naturkunde Leibniz-Institut für Evolutions- und
Biodiversitätsforschung), Prof. P. Martin Sander (Steinmann Institute of
Geology, Mineralogy, and Paleontology, Division of Paleontology, University of
Bonn), Prof. Lars Schmitz (W. M. Keck Science Department, Claremont McKenna,
Pitzer, and Scripps Colleges, Claremont, California) and Dr. Olivier Rieppel
(The Field Museum, Chicago, Illinois).
The
244-million-year-old fossil, named Thalattoarchon
saurophagis (lizard-eating sovereign of the sea) is an early representative
of the ichthyosaurs, a group of marine reptiles that lived at the same time as
dinosaurs and roamed the oceans for 160 million years. It had a massive skull
and jaws armed with large teeth with cutting edges used to seize and slice
through other marine reptiles in the Triassic seas. Because it was a
meta-predator, capable of feeding on animals with bodies similar in size to its
own, Thalattoarchon was
comparable to modern orca whales.
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