#LIST OF LARGEST PREHISTORIC ANIMALS SKIN#

One famous example is the worm Hallucigenia, which so confused everyone involved that it was reconstructed upside-down for the better part of a decade. The fauna found in the Burgess Shale was almost obnoxiously uncategorisable. Thanks to a fluke of geology, the conditions that produced the Burgess Shale were also capable of preserving soft tissue, giving palaeontologists a rare chance to look into what the seas looked like during the first days of the animal kingdom. One of the problems with studying the very earliest phase of animal life - weвЂ™re talking half a billion years at this point - is that itвЂ™s squishy, and squishy is not of much benefit when it comes to preserving fossils. So letвЂ™s go to the deep, deep past, revealed wonderfully by the Burgess Shale. Cool, but nowhere near the sort of weirdness the past can provide. So far weвЂ™ve had a dolphin analogue in Temnodontosaurus and an actual crocodile. hatcheri was present on both the western side of the seaway (a slightly smaller species dominated the east), happily chowing through dinosaurs who were foolish enough to get too close. During the late Cretaceous (80 million years ago), North America was split by a shallow sea, the Western Interior Seaway. Your terrifying vision is Deinosuchus hatcheri, a crocodile adapted to more or less the exact same situation as a modern saltwater but in a world inhabited by giant dinosaurs.

#LIST OF LARGEST PREHISTORIC ANIMALS SKIN#

Armored skin thick enough to turn aside more or less anything. Terrifying teeth in terrifying, dino-crushing jaws. Now that you have a saltwater crocodile in your head, make one, oh, twice as big. They have the strongest bite of any living animal. Unlike most crocodiles theyвЂ™re capable of jumping clear out of the water to get to it. Like all crocodiles, theyвЂ™re ambush predators who use water as cover to attack their prey. They are at home in the open ocean as well as along the coast. Salties are strong, fast and surprisingly smart. They are, after all, 20-foot, 2,000-pound apex predators more than happy to eat anything they come across, including you. Spare a thought for the poor ocean-going creatures minding their own business before one of these huge assholes rams into them from below at speed, opens those long, toothy jaws and turns them into lunch. This monster considered 13-foot oceanic reptiles a delicious snack. One closely-related species possessed the largest eyes of any known animal, perfect for hunting in deeper oceanic waters another has been found with the remains of a different ichthyosaur in is stomach. emnodontosaurus was a powerful swimmer with strong jaws, well-equipped to chow down on other Jurassic swimmers. ItвЂ™s not the largest ichthyosaur ever to grace the seas, but itвЂ™s up there, and itвЂ™s a far more developed predator than its giant forebears. Fast-forward a little bit and you have primitive ichthyosaurs, creatures so well adapted to oceanic life that they ended up looking like a cross between a crocodile and an extremely ill-tempered, extremely large dolphin.ДЇast-forward even further, to the early Jurassic (175 million years ago), and you have Temnodontosaurus eurycephalus. In the aftermath of the Permian extinction, which killed off a frankly horrifying number of creatures, a group of terrestrial reptiles took to the depleted seas. Ichthyosaurs evolved 250 million years ago. TO THE IMAGINARY TIME MACHINE! Temnodontosaurus eurycephalus Grumpy croco-dolphin Underwater murder-beasts have a long and distinguished (pre-)history, and I thought it would be fun to introduce yвЂ™all to some new pals. But now that weвЂ™re talking about terrifying underwater murder-beasts, why just settle for just the ones we have around now? And the great white shark, of course, needs no introduction. Saltwater crocodiles are bulletproof murder tanks. Thanks to their intelligence and pack-hunting techniques, orcas are, perhaps, the most dangerous hunters ever to swim the ocean. The Earth has some very cool aquatic predators swimming about. So if you havenвЂ™t seen it yet, here you go! This article was originally published on SB Nation a while ago, but was always intended for a Secret Base-y audience.

List of largest prehistoric animals