This armored fish had everything to be frightening: it is described by the scientists who have just devoted a new study to it as a “wrecking ball of the depths”!
A large tuna rather than a large shark: this is the appearance that was likely to have Dunkleosteus terrelli, top predator of the Devonian seas. If the image may seem (a bit) disappointing, this armored fish had everything to be frightening since it is described by the authors of a new study as a “wrecking ball of the depths”, nothing less. The mascot of the city of Cleveland, Ohio in the United States, has enough to maintain its aura.
Dimensions to review
In the Devonian seas, about 360 million years ago, strange armored fish ruled. Named placoderms, they were among the first animals with a real jaw. Real sea monsters, the largest of which, such as the one in this study, were said to be over ten meters long and which would no doubt have been able to crunch (with its two pairs of gnathal plates, sharp as razor blades). ) a shark in two: ancestral species of sharks already existed at that time. This is the discourse widely relayed in the city of Cleveland and in the majority of publications concerning Dark Osteus but in the 150 years of research since the discovery of the fossilized remains of this large fish on the shores of Lake Erie in 1867, scientists may have made incorrect assumptions about its size and shape. That’s what Russell Engelman of Case Western Reserve University says.
The wrong estimate of the size and shape of Dark Osteus is probably due to the fact that only skulls of this fish have been found intact. But they correspond to the armored part of their body. The rest of the skeleton, cartilaginous, was not preserved and to reconstruct it, the scientists took as models arthrodires (the group of placoderms of the Dark Osteus) smaller or even skeletons of current fish. In addition, the main reconstructions date from the 1930s […]
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