Largest animal that ever lived on Earth was 17-metre-long sea predator, reveal scientists

New research has revealed that the ichthyosaurus species that lived in the dinosaur era was the most gigantic sea creature that ever lived. The proceedings of the study were published in Science Magazine, which revealed that ichthyosaurs, a group of fish-shaped marine reptiles, evolved to gigantic sizes in a timeframe of only 2.5 million years. As per the research, whales took around 90% of their 55 million-year evolution to achieve such huge sizes, but it took ichthyosaurs only the first 1% of their 150 million-year evolution to achieve such massive sizes.

According to the introduction of the study, "We describe an ichthyosaur with a 2-m-long skull from the Fossil Hill Fauna as a new species of Cymbospondylus." At present, this is the largest known tetrapod of its time, on land or in the sea, and is the first in a series of ocean giants. "

Researchers have observed that ichthyosaurs evolved to gigantic size in a much shorter time span than whales, during the time when the world was recovering from devastating extinction. According to Lars Schmitz, who is an associate professor of biology at Scripps College in Claremont, California, "ichthyosaurs evolved gigantism much faster than whales, in a time where the world was recovering from devastating extinction [at the end of the Permian period]," reported Sputnik, citing LiveScience.

"It is a nice glimmer of hope and a sign of the resilience of life — if environmental conditions are right, evolution can happen very fast, and life can bounce back," Schmitz said.

Researchers found prehistoric ichthyosaur fossils in the Augusta Mountains of northeastern Nevada in 1998. "Only a few vertebrae were sticking out of the rock, but it was clear the animal was large," he added It was in 2015 that the researchers were able to fully excavate the animal fossils and they managed to recover a few parts of the sea giant that included a skull, shoulder, and flipper-like appendage, which were placed carefully at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County for further research. Notably, the researchers named the new species as Cymbospondylus youngorum. It was found that during the Triassic epoch, the sea animal lived around 247 million years ago. The researcher noted that its appearance looked more like a sea dragon, as a fully grown Cymbospondylus youngorum would have measured more than 17 meters (55 feet), with a nearly 2-meter-long (6.5 foot) skull.

Researchers observation

According to a study, C youngorum would have existed in the Panthalassic Ocean, and the species presumably survived on smaller species like ichthyosaurs, fish, and possibly squid. It weighed around 41 metric tonnes and lived in the ocean only 5 million years after "the Great Dying," which was a big extinction event that killed nearly 90% of species across the world some 252 million years ago at the end of the Permian epoch. A surge in the number of marine molluscs known as ammonoids happened between 1 million and 3 million years after the great extinction event. The researcher noted that ichthyosaur evolution into gigantic size was due to survival on ammonites and conodonts that lived after the mass extinction. The researchers observed that whales got bigger in size due to chopping down on highly productive primary producers, including plankton, which was missing during dinosaur-age food systems. Although it took a lot of time for whales and ichthyosaurs to reach gigantism, there are some similarities between both species.

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