<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > Beast of The World 01: From sea to land
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Basically, children over the age of three in Beijing know a class of ancient monsters, that is, dinosaurs. Although they can only see fossils except for the cottage version of the monster, the children are still eager to talk about the Tyrannosaurus rex, triceratops, velociraptor and other heads, even teachers and parents can not say them.
Interest in vanishing monsters is a normal phenomenon, indicating that children have a natural curiosity and a strong spirit of exploration. However, most children may not know that the historical animals with the surname "fear" are far more than dinosaurs, and if they are listed, they can almost fill a museum, and each of them is strangely shaped and very distinctive.
The earliest of these is probably the dinosaur fish, this strange guy once ruled the earth's oceans, when the mother of the dinosaur was not yet born. In 1868, the American naturalist John Newpoli established the concept of the genus Dinichthys based on the fossils found.
A scholar is restoring the fossil of the Tyrell dinosaur, the Dunn's fish, which is still chilling hundreds of millions of years later
Its ferocity is not an illusion, the fish was the fiercest predator in the Devonian, and for the first time on Earth it had this concept because of it. In the ocean 460 million years ago, 6-9 meters long and weighing a ton and a half of dinosaur fish could attack any kind of creature in the ocean at that time. They have sharper bladed teeth than a guillotine, can bite sharks in two pieces in one bite, and their bodies are covered with hard armor, making it impossible for opponents to attack.
However, the teeth of the fish are not really teeth, but part of the skull, there is no root, pulp and other structures, so the fish is more like a "cast" killing machine. It is also because the exoskeleton is developed and easy to form fossils, and now many times around the world have found more complete fossils of dinosaurs, giving us a fierce image of them.
The only opponent of the fish is themselves, and scientists have found many bite marks on the fossils of the fish, sometimes even the thick head armor has been bitten through, and judging from the tooth marks, the murderer is their kind.
Probably because of its bulky size and low intelligence, it is difficult to hunt down more flexible marine organisms, and it is difficult to maintain its huge body by eating inconvenient food such as sea shells, and the fish gradually went into decline after the prosperity of the late Devonian Period, and eventually quietly disappeared on the road of biological evolution.
The fear of fish is gone, but the real "fear of the word" team has just begun, and the follow-up members are endless - however, there is no blood relationship between them, it is the human habit of adding a word of fear to the guys who look at the palpitations.
If you do not count the prosperous and widely known dinosaur family, the second animal in the history of evolution to be included in the family tree of the dinosaur family is more ferocious than the dinosaur, because the dinosaur can only dominate in the water, and this animal eats all over water, which is - the crocodile.
The name Deinosuchus comes from the Greek word meaning "scary crocodile" and lived about 82 million to 73 million years ago
At first glance, crocodiles are not much different from modern crocodiles in terms of shape, which also shows that crocodiles are a successful animal that completed most of its evolution 80 million years ago. But if you look at it in terms of body shape, it's completely different. At present, the world's largest bay crocodile is 7 meters long, generally only about 5 meters long; and the size of the crocodile, the most conservative estimate is more than 10 meters, and some people even speculate that it can reach 15 meters long and 8 tons and a half weight when it is alive. Such behemoths, still eating meat, it is difficult to imagine how they can live today, to know that the largest tiger weighs less than 400 kilograms.
However, in the Cretaceous period of crocodile life, this does not seem to be too much of a problem, and this restoration clearly depicts the crocodile ambushing the dinosaurs who came to drink water in the water - the crocodile is an alligator, and this predation pattern is exactly what the alligator often adopted, and to this day, they still suddenly bite the forelimbs of the animal, and then drag it into the water to eat. The crocodile's nostrils grow above its face, suggesting that it can hide its entire body in water, making it suitable for such an ambush, and that they may spew out a column of water while breathing like a whale.
However, the crocodiles are probably most commonly eaten by sea turtles. Crocodile fossils are mainly found in North America, where crocodile fossils are often accompanied by the remains of side-necked turtles, some of which can be seen with tooth marks. It is speculated that in the era of no human intervention, there was a large amount of seaweed in the local ocean, which made the side-necked turtle breed in large numbers, and their thick shell could block the attack of most killer animals, but they could not resist the terrifying bite force of the crocodile, which was four times more powerful than the bay crocodile, and the crocodile relied on such a large amount of food to feed itself.
And the crocodile killing dinosaurs is not out of thin air. According to the current fossil discovery, there was no dinosaur larger than the crocodile in the Cretaceous southern United States, and a section of the duck-billed dragon tail vertebra fossil found there were also tooth marks on the crocodile. It was inferred from this that the crocodile was probably the top predator in the area, and even the carnivorous dinosaurs did not dare to pick their edges.
In the late Cretaceous Period, with the extinction of dinosaurs, crocodiles seem to have become extinct because they were too large to adapt to drastic changes in the environment, but their pocket descendants still let us imagine their style.
After the extinction of the dinosaurs, there was a great decline in species on Earth for a time - large animals almost disappeared for a while, and even predators became legends, and small animals must have been ecstatic.
Unfortunately, the good days did not last long, and a new kind of meat eater evolved, filling the gap of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, who frantically chased the three-toed horse and hunted the water dragon beast, showing the viciousness of the next generation of Earth overlords.
This is also known as the Phorusrhacidae of the Terror Bird.
The crane was a group of ferocious bird killers at the time, standing 2.5 meters tall, weighing about two adult men, and its fiercest weapons included a huge hard beak and claws resembling a Tyrannosaurus rex. In fact, they originally evolved from dinosaurs, and their ancestors were close relatives of velociraptors, and this bloodline is not a good person at first glance.
The horror bird has a beaked skull, which can reach more than a meter in length, and its lethality is unmatched by any falcon today
However, although the crane and the crane are as tall as the crane, they are far from each other. Cranes are wading birds that can fly, but later evolved long legs because they lived in the creek swamp to facilitate the search for food in the water. The cranes are closer to ostriches in blood, they are walking birds, and they have never flown into the sky in the process of evolution. As a result, they all have thick bones and tough muscle tissue, and they are not afraid to fight with terrestrial mammals.
However, you a bird does not think about how to fly, all day with the tiger and leopard on the ground to grab food, it is really intolerable, so everyone has an opinion is normal, so, in a kind of terror bird called the titan bird (a close relative of the moa crane) skeleton, people found the skull of a bag of sword tigers that were fiercely competitive with it at that time.....
The crane is at a disadvantage in evolution, its forelimbs have long been degraded, it is difficult to compete with the evolutionary quadrupeds, the skull is too heavy, hindering its further intellectual development (the head is too large to maintain balance), and eventually forced by mammalian beasts to the road of scavenging, scavenging birds such as vultures still come to compete...
It is surprising that the dinosaurs stumbled under such unfavorable circumstances until they finally became extinct 1.5 million years ago (according to uncertain accounts, they lived in Patagonia until more than 10,000 years ago), which is also a tenacious bird.
After the fear of fish there is a crocodile, after the crocodile there is a crane, who is the next member of the family class?
【End】
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