Hello everyone, it's time for "Tao Ge blind to live" again, and today we continue to nag about the biological evolution history of the ancient ocean.
Last time we talked about the ichthyosaurs who opened the dragon tribe (lizards) to dominate the ocean, from the end of the Triassic to the beginning of the Jurassic, ran rampant for tens of millions of years, but they were not able to defeat the dragons, and finally fell on the eve of the Cretaceous meteorites with hatred.
Ichthyosaur fossils
After that, the ocean belongs to the canglong, and to understand this powerful race that emerged at the end of the Cretaceous period, we must start from the dragon and beast competition.
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Finfish came ashore to become quadrupeds, and in the Carboniferous Period they defeated the insectoids (arthropods) entrenched in the forest and gained land domination.
The victors then parted ways, with one part becoming the Dragon Clan (Lizards) and the other evolving into the Orcs (Hegong Order), and the two races of the same lineage developed and grew separately, and for the next 300 million years, they fought endlessly for land supremacy.
At the beginning of the dragon-beast struggle, the orcs were dominant, and many dragons were squeezed to the marginal ecological niche and had to consider returning to the sea, so the ichthyosaurs in the dragon tribe entered the ocean first in the middle of the Triassic period and quickly dominated.
The ichthyosaurs descended into the sea, opening up the dragon clan's domination of the ocean
Another ethnic group in the Dragon Clan, the body surface is covered with scales, the body is mostly elongated, so it is called scaly dragon. They also came to the sea during the Jurassic Period and began to attack the rule of the Ichthyosaurs, setting off the prelude to the Dragon Civil War.
In order to quickly defeat the Ichthyosaur clan, the Scaly Dragon sent the fiercest warriors - Shanglong, all of them were huge beasts weighing several tons in length of 6 to 10 meters, and the Ichthyosaurs were overwhelmed by the fierce attack, and finally had to give up the throne of the "Top Predator of the Sea", leaving the rich shallow sea and going to the bitter cold deep sea to avoid the aggressive edge of the Scaly Dragon.
" Slippery Toothosaurus " belongs to the suborder " Supraurus " in the lower order " Lepidoptera "
Before the spring was over, the fallen flowers were all over the place. Just when the ichthyosaur was weakening and the scaly dragon was expectantly "enjoying the spring", a small extinction event of the "Senorman-Turmn Order" suddenly came, and the entire general order where the ichthyosaur was located was directly annihilated, and the scaly dragon was also seriously injured, and none of the most elite upper dragon suborders under its command survived, becoming the burial of the old rival ichthyosaur, buried in the deep-sea sediment of the Cretaceous Period.
The sad exit of the fish dragon, the fall of the king of the dragon, so that the sea at that time once again returned to the situation of the dragon leaderless - the old overlord shark that had been lurking for hundreds of millions of years, the seemingly docile but sinister and swift hard bone fish in the benthic ecological niche, the huge sea crocodile in the shallow water but always intended to enter the ocean, all parties were eager to move, and for a time the mountain rain wanted to wind the building...
(PS: After commenting and personally verifying, the current mainstream theory is that the fined dragons in the suborder Plesiosaurs are independent and separate from the lower order of lepidosaurs, so the upper dragons belong to the finosaurs rather than the scaly dragons, but this article still uses the classification of the lower order of the scaly dragons - the general order of the finosaurs - the plesiosaurs - the suborder of the upper dragon)
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Let's flip the timeline back a bit and see what happened on shore as Ichthyosaurs and Scaly Dragons fought for ocean supremacy.
From the Permian period onwards, the battle for dragons and beasts on land entered the second stage, and the dragons occupied the offensive for the first time, began to sweep through the freshwater tides, and continued to march inland. At the end of the Triassic Period, the main dragon-shaped lower class under the dragon clan sacrificed their most successful, dazzling, legendary, and longest-ruling star race on land, the dinosaur general order.
The main dragon-shaped lower order is roughly classified
As dinosaurs flourished in the Jurassic Period, the Main Dragons ushered in their high-light moments on land.
The smaller Scaly Dragon Clan can only be reduced to the background of the times, struggling to survive in the cracks of various ecological niches. Before there was the peak of the blood-related main dragon clan, and then there was the short army of the beast clan who were enemies of the world, and under the support of the flickering and struggling, the scaly dragon clan once again set its sights on the rich and vast sea--they sent a small cliff lizard to tentatively put its front paws into the water during the excellent historical window of the leaderless dragons in the sea.
A cliff lizard with a body length of less than 1 meter
No one expected that this cliff lizard would become the ultimate nightmare of all marine life in the last 20 million years of the Cretaceous Period after millions of years - the dragon.
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Compared with their predecessors, Shanglong's road to the sea was so smooth that it could even be summed up in one sentence - they directly took the scripts of the Ichthyosaurus and Shanglong and quickly copied them on themselves.
They first evolved webbed limbs and flattened tails to swim at high speeds underwater.
Early Dracaenae: Dallas lizards, small in size, in the early 1 meter
Then they kept increasing their size, whether it was Neptune or Hoffman, they could grow to more than 15 meters and more than 10 tons, which had a significant body advantage over other marine animals of the same era.
About 10 to 15 meters long, the neptune dragon of the family Apatrandha
The dragons are even smooth enough to not need to strengthen the strong bite force that should belong to the standard "top predators", and their two-stage mandible is more like designed to pull the prey deep into the mouth and swallow it raw, which greatly affects the attachment of the muscles and severely restricts the power. It is estimated that the bite force of Hoffman 's canglong ( narrowly defined " ) is likely to be only 40,000 to 60,000 newtons , while the tyrannosaurus rex on land during the same period had a bite force of up to 200,000 newtons.
Hoffman Canglong
This slightly shabby bite seems to imply that there are no competitors in the ocean of the same era that deserve to be taken seriously.
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But there are still some fierce challengers who have launched an assault on the dragon, especially the sharks that have silenced almost the entire Mesozoic Era, and at the end of the Cretaceous Period, they evolved such as the Golden Kitchen Shark as an 8-meter-long Assassin hunter, who traveled quickly and without a trace. On the hunting list of the golden kitchen shark, in addition to small creatures, it also includes medium-sized sea climbs such as plesiosaurs, and even smaller dragons are also listed!
The golden kitchen shark is known as the "throat of the Cretaceous", and is in a confrontation with the dragon
The teleost fish from the end of the Devonian period to the end of the Cretaceous period, more low-key than the shark, and finally a decent warrior has finally emerged - sword shooter fish. They are 4 to 6 meters long, equipped with sharp fangs, and with the ancestral anti-sky swimming speed of the bony fish, they are like armed ships, cruising the ocean at the end of the Cretaceous period. Although there is no evidence of sword-shooting fish hunting in the fossil record, I really can't imagine how a small dragon with a body size of less than 3 meters could escape under the pursuit of sword-shooting fish.
Large dragon with a herd of swords shooting fish
There are also crocodiles about 10 meters at the end of the Cretaceous Period, because of the high degree of overlap with the large carnivorous dinosaur ecological niches on the shoals, sometimes swim to the coast to compete with the dragons, and even some scientists believe that rather than fighting with the gregarious Alberta dragons, the crocodile prefers to squeeze the solitary Neptune dragons (members of the family " ) in the shallow sea.
Crocodiles
But how can the fire of a mere ant compete with the flames? What Canglong held in his hand was the secret book of the Evolution of the Dragon Clan for hundreds of millions of years, and in just a few million years, it had completed the road of domination that the pioneer had completed for tens of millions of years, and there was no one to stop where the sword blade pointed, and even the most powerful beings could only flash around beside the Canglong, barely acting as a medium-sized predator of the second echelon.
The dragon enters the sea, and the sentient beings retreat
Even in the later stage, in order to further explore the ecological niche of the deep sea, canglong came up with an almost perfect evolutionary model - floating dragon.
Their bodies have begun to gradually correct from slender noodles to the torpedo-like shape of modern tuna, which means that while swimming faster, they can store more fat in their bodies, making it easy to dive deeper into the sea in search of food. The floating dragon's recipe is more complete than our human diet - as long as it is not as big as it is, eat it all!
Ben Nelson Floating Dragon
The late dragon represented by the floating dragon is an uncompromising nightmare in the sea, and almost no creature can pose a threat to it except for the friction of the same kind of people of comparable size for territory. If it weren't for the destined asteroid, and giving the dragon millions of years more, they would most likely have evolved more advanced dorsal fins and moved closer to today's killer whales, in fact, ichthyosaurs have had such a trend. Imagine the ferocious concept of a killer whale over 15 meters tall.
But under the meteorite, all beings are equal. The dragon permanently sealed its splendor in the fossil layer of 65 million years ago, along with it, all the non-avian dinosaurs - known as the "Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event".
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In fact, the story of the dragon is not complicated, I consult the relevant information, always feel inexplicable, this group of strong dragon clans seem to be born overnight, and instantly occupy the highest ecological niche in the ocean, compared with the previous fierce dragon infighting on the dragon, the dragon has some "no hero, then the beginning of the vertical son to become famous" meaning, its panel attributes are strong but not against the sky, there are few can prove their own strong battle of the gods, the dragon appeared so suddenly, smoothly dominated, and suddenly extinct.
But after all, it is the last Senran ghost fire in the "Hell Aquarium" of the Mesozoic Ocean, which is chilling, it is also the last monarch of the 200 million-year-old Ocean Empire of the Dragon Clan, which makes people look at it in awe, and it is one of the very few ancient stars that can be remembered among the vast and diverse species, and it is still relished.
Diplodocus under the family Diplodocus
With the fateful end of the dragon, the Mesozoic Era belonging to the dragon clan ended, and the ensuing earth era, whether land or sea, became the world of mammals. But before they can do, mammals need to complete a thorough baptism, especially in the oceans, where they will face the toughest people ever seen in the history of earth's biology! Of course, this is another story.
I am Tao Ge, I have seen here, don't you pay attention to it? Don't pay attention, the next article will not see yo!!