An international team of scientists has discovered in the desert of Nevada (USA) the remains of a monstrous marine predator, 8.6 meters in length , which could have been the first great predator of the oceans , capable of devouring a prey the same size. So mammoth it is that it took three weeks to dig up his remains and prepare it for transport by land and by helicopter.
As described by German and American researchers in the journal PNAS , the T halattoarchon saurophagis was a marine reptile of the ichthyosaur family and lived 244 million years ago. It had a massive skull and jaws armed with long, sharp-edged teeth intended to sever other marine reptiles that inhabited the Triassic seas. As a meta-predator , everything indicates that it was frequent that it hunted prey of the same size, which is why the researchers compare it to modern killer whales.
The study highlights that just eight million years before the appearance of Thalattoarchon , a severe extinction at the end of the Permian period killed between 80% and 96% of the species in the planet's oceans. The emergence of a predator like Thalattoarchon shows the rapid recovery and evolution of an ecosystem of modern structure after extinction. And it could help us forecast how terrestrial ecosystems will evolve in the future.
