The ocean beasts that can swallow the bus in one bite, the carnivorous birds with heads bigger than human heads, the big birds that soar in the sky in flocks, as big as small airplanes... Paleontologists continue to discover strange and extinct animals that once lived on the earth, including huge dinosaurs, mammals, birds, fish, etc., and the discovery of these paleontologists shows us the vibrant life landscape of the ancient earth.
<h1>Giant Eagle: Haast hawk that feeds on moa birds</h1>
The Haast eagle is a giant eagle that once lived in New Zealand and is the largest known eagle, once at the top of the local food chain. The Haast hawk feeds mainly on a giant bird, the moa, which, somewhat like the modern ostrich, is flightless and is now extinct. Researchers have found claw marks on fossil bones of moa birds weighing up to 200 kilograms. The Haast eagle is so large that it is close to the physical limits of bird flight. Studies have shown that birds cannot fly normally when their weight reaches a certain limit, which is about 15 kilograms of weight, which is the estimated weight of the Haast eagle.
The ancestor of the Haast eagle was a very small eagle weighing only about 1 kilogram, equivalent to a small squirrel, which crossed the ocean from Australia to New Zealand and eventually evolved into a huge bird of prey that weighed up to 15 kilograms and reached a wingspan of up to 3 meters. In contrast, the larger modern bird of prey bald eagle weighs about 6.4 kg and has a wingspan of about 1.8 meters.
After arriving in New Zealand, the Haast hawk gained 15-fold weight after 10,000 years of evolution, and such a rapidly changing example is unique among land vertebrates. So what makes the Haast eagle able to evolve in the "instant" of geological time into a predator that feeds on giant animals such as moa? Some scientists believe that when the Haster eagle first arrived in New Zealand, there were no other animals on the island that could compete with them for a "big meal" like moa birds, food sources were abundant, and they had enough ability to obtain these abundant foods, and the largest individuals who could hunt the largest prey were most likely to successfully reproduce offspring, so the Huaster eagle's body rapidly grew in size over a short geological period.
In 1871, scientists knew about the existence of the Haast eagle based on unearthed fossil skeletons, but were not entirely aware of the behavior of the megafauna. Because of their sheer size, some scientists believe they are scavengers rather than predators. Now, scientists have used modern scanning techniques to study the body structure of the Haster eagle's skull and spine, build computer models, and compare them with modern scavengers and predators to finally understand the living habits of this extinct giant eagle.
Studies have shown that the Haast eagle can attack the target prey from the air at a speed of up to 80 kilometers per hour, targeting the throat and head of the prey when preying, and its claws are strong enough to kill moa birds weighing up to 260 kilograms, and may even attack early human children.
700 years ago, before humans first arrived, New Zealand was a bird kingdom without land mammals, and more than 250 species of birds lived in this bird paradise, forming a unique ecological environment. The Haast eagle was the main subject in cave paintings and mythological stories of new Zealand's earliest inhabitants, the Maori. However, shortly after humans arrived on the island of New Zealand, the haaster's main food, the moa, was hunted down by humans, and most of the dense forested habitat was cut down by humans, and the Haast hawk disappeared from the island around 1400 AD. Meanwhile, about 40 percent of the island's birds were killed by the Haast eagle, becoming extinct shortly after humans reached old age.
Scientists point out that the world in which the Haast eagle lived has disappeared, and now that many habitats are under threat due to human activities, the extinction of the Haast hawk is a profound lesson for us.
<h1>Giant Crocodile: Godzilla, who dominates the Jurassic Ocean</h1>
This is a newly discovered extinct marine creature that lived from the late Jurassic to the early Cretaceous period (about 135 million years ago), with a length of about 4 meters, a long muzzle of 46 centimeters, and 10 centimeters of jagged teeth, and is a huge carnivore. This ancient sea creature with a dinosaur-like head, a crocodile-like body, and fish fins, has some of the characteristics of the "Godzilla" monster in Hollywood horror movies, so scientists gave it the nickname "Godzilla", the scientific name is Dakosaurus, which means "ferocious lizard" in Greek.
After studying the fossils, scientists confirmed that this ancient troll was a member of the crocodile family, but it was much more ferocious than other crocodiles at the same time, and some other crocodiles with long and small muzzles and needle-like teeth were only suitable for preying on small fish and mollusks, and this giant crocodile was just the opposite, with a short muzzle, a huge jaw, and giant teeth with jagged edges. All this suggests that Godzilla had a huge bite force, was able to tear off large chunks of flesh from prey, and that in his time, they were clearly at the top of the ocean food chain and were the most terrifying predators in the ocean at the time.
The giant crocodile "Godzilla" often lives on the shore, but judging from its adaptability to marine life, this giant crocodile is likely to complete mating in the sea. Whether they give birth in the sea like dolphins and ichthyosaurs, or come ashore like turtles, these questions are unknown because their eggs and nests have not yet been discovered.
The giant crocodile Godzilla is 4 to 5 meters long, which is not small compared to the crocodiles living on The Earth today. Streamlined bodies, with fin-like tails, allow them to maximize their kinetic efficiency in the water. Compared to modern crocodiles, their swimming level is obviously better.
Fossil bones of the giant crocodile Godzilla were found in Patagonia, once a tropical Pacific bay. About 135 million years ago, when the giant crocodile "Godzilla" wandered in the ocean, there were still many kinds of crocodiles living on the earth, but the former's huge size and ferocity made other types of crocodiles untouchable.
<h1>Giant Bear: The cave bear, a formidable rival faced by human ancestors</h1>
Based on a study of fossil skulls of the cave bear, an ancient giant carnivore discovered in Romania, scientists have pointed out that in addition to saber-toothed tigers, wolves, and man-eating birds of prey that terrified our ancestors, the cave bear was another ferocious animal that made our ancestors uneasy. In other words, the cave bear was once one of the strongest opponents our human ancestors faced. Previously scientists thought that cave bears were herbivores, feeding on berries and grass roots, and the recent fossil bones of cave bears in the Carpathian Mountains show that they are not at all the gentle appearance we think, but very fierce carnivores, and they even eat people.
The cave bear, whose scientific name is Ursus spelaeus, lived in Europe during the Pleistocene period. The name "cave bear" comes from the fact that most of its fossils were found in caves, which also indicates that the animal spends much more time in caves than brown bears, which only enter caves during hibernation. As a result, almost all of the bones found in caves belong to cave bears. Cave bears are huge, with males growing up to 1,000 kilograms, equivalent to the largest Alaskan brown bear and polar bear, the latter two being the largest bears living on Earth today, weighing an average of about 500 kilograms.
According to the latest estimates, the cave bear went extinct about 27,800 years ago, 130,000 years before previous estimates, and is the earliest large mammal to go extinct in the most recent mass extinction in Earth's history. Large mammals that became extinct after cave bears include mammoths, woolly rhinos, giant deer, and cave lions. So, what caused these large mammals to go extinct? This has always been a difficult mystery. Some scientists believe that early human hunting led to the extinction of giant mammals, but others believe that this claim lacks convincing evidence. There is also a theory that some unknown virus or bacterium may have contributed to the extinction of large mammals. But this theory does not explain why multiple animals of very different sizes went extinct almost simultaneously.
Radioactive dating of fossil cave bear bones found that the age of the cave bear's extinction coincided with the age of drastic changes in the Earth's climate, suggesting that the cave bear went extinct during the last glacial period in Europe. The study believes that some large mammals living on the earth at that time were mainly vegetarian, especially feeding on some specialized plants, due to the obvious cooling of the earth's climate during the ice age, the vegetation on which they depended for survival disappeared in large quantities, and the serious lack of food eventually led to the extinction of these large mammals. Compared to other extinct megafauna, cave bears live in a relatively limited geographical range, with their range limited to Europe (from Spain to the Ural Mountains in Russia), coupled with their vegetarian lifestyle of feeding on high-quality plants, which may be the main reason why cave bears have been extinct much earlier than other giant mammals. However, the latest research also points out that although cave bears are mainly vegetarian, they do not reject meat, they are omnivorous, and their food includes at least some animal protein, which may be some of their kind that died in hibernation, or the smaller Eurasian brown bears of their contemporaries.
So why do brown bears, which share the common ancestor of The European cave bear, now roam most of Europe and northern Asia? There is no definitive answer to this question yet, and it may involve different dietary preferences, hibernation strategies, geographic range, habitat preferences, and perhaps human predation.
In 1774, scientists first described cave bears and classified them as dragons, unicorns, apes, canines, or cats. In 1794, scientists described the newly discovered fossil bones of cave bears and named them "cave bears", believing that they should belong to the polar bear class of animals. Since then, more than two hundred years of scientific research has been conducted on this giant paleontology, but to this day, the timing and cause of the extinction of the cave bear are still controversial.
<h1>Giant Bird: A bird with bone teeth as big as a small airplane</h1>
Imagine a flock of birds as big as a small airplane soaring in the sky, what a spectacular sight! This is the ancient giant seabird bone-toothed bird that lived in britain 50 million years ago.
Scientists have found a well-preserved fossil skeleton of a prehistoric giant bird near the mouth of the Thames on the southeast coast of England, which belongs to an extinct bird, with a body as large as a small aircraft, a light wing length of nearly 5 meters, and most peculiarly, a sharp tooth-like skeleton structure in its mouth. This giant bird that flew 50 million years ago in the skies of present-day England is a close relative of modern geese and ducks.
By today's standards, it was a rather peculiar animal, especially with a sharp tooth-like protrusion at the edge of its beak, or "pseudo-teeth" (the constituent substance is keratin, the same as the substance that makes up our hair and nails, while the real teeth are made of enamel and ivory). The ancestors of modern birds lost their teeth in the course of evolution in order to reduce weight in order to be more favorable for flight. But scientists believe that there is a good reason why the bone-toothed bird (also called the pseudo-toothed bird, a large family of seabirds in prehistoric times) re-evolved the "pseudo-toothed bird". These ancient seabirds often flew over the surface of the sea, killing hunting fish and squid with their wings, and if their beaks were like other birds, it would be difficult to catch slippery fish. Therefore, for the needs of hunting, "pseudo-teeth" gradually evolved on their beaks to prevent food from slipping away from the mouth.
Another characteristic of the bone-toothed bird is its large size, even the smallest of them being as large as a modern albatross. The largest bony-toothed bird has a wingspan of up to 5 to 6 meters, making it the largest bird ever built. Throughout the Cenozoic Age, the behemoths of this bird were dominated over the oceans, and they passed by the time of human evolution, and the last osteopods that existed lived in the same era as the humans of the Early Pleistocene.
It has been theorized that bone-toothed birds have gradually disappeared under the competition of massive evolution of other seabirds, cetaceans, and fins. But in fact, the competition for food between bone-toothed birds and cetaceans, pinnipeds and other birds may not be as fierce. Both birds and pinnipeds need to raise offspring on flat coastal beaches, so competition for "nursery land" could affect bird populations. However, the hilly highlands of islands or coastal areas can also provide places for the bony toothed birds to raise offspring, which are out of reach for pinnipeds. Like many albatrosses today, bone-toothed birds may need strong updrafts to help them take off, so they may prefer to build nests higher up in the terrain to raise their offspring rather than compete for limited living space in pinniped colonies.
<h1>Giant Bird: A terrifying bird with a fierce temperament and an astonishing speed</h1>
Scientists have deduced that the frightening bird (also known as the "horror bird"),despite its large size, has an astonishing speed, and its runners can reach speeds of up to 48 kilometers per hour. In open and open wilderness, speed is crucial for predators, determining their survival and future, and higher speeds not only mean that they can hunt prey on a larger range, but also more conducive to launching a surprise attack on their prey, catching off guard. Some studies say that the fastest running cheetah in the world today is not as fast as a frightening bird.
The huge beak, coupled with the speed of the trampling, the speed of the human, and the endurance of long-distance running, make this prehistoric giant bird completely devoid of the name of "terror bird", becoming one of the most feared carnivores at the top of the earth's terrestrial food chain in the Miocene era.
South America, where the birds lived, was once a continental plate isolated from other lands, so there were no stronger predators to compete with them, but about 3 million years ago, the great exchange of organisms that occurred after the collision of the continental plates of North and South America caused some predators such as jaguars and saber-toothed tigers that originally lived in North America to flood into South America, and in the cruel natural competition, the birds gradually went extinct.
<h1>Giant Fish: The earliest "ocean overlord" Tyrell Dunn's fish</h1>
Recently, scientists used fossil skulls to create biomechanical models to simulate how and how hard their skulls move and bite in order to confirm the powerful bite force of a prehistoric fish called the "Tyrell Dunn's Fish." It turned out that this ancient marine fish had more teeth than all other creatures known today, and its sharp front teeth could easily tear sharks in half, making it the earliest "ocean overlord" on Earth.
Using computer models, the scientists concluded that this prehistoric giant fish was amazingly powerful, with a bite force of up to 453 kilograms under one bite, the most powerful of all fish in history, and the bite force concentrated in the tip of the canine tooth was as high as 563 kilograms per square centimeter, which was enough to compete with Rex Tyrannosaurus and modern crocodiles. What's even more frightening is that it only takes 1/50th of a second to open its huge mouth, and this speed can even produce a suction force on the object, directly sucking the prey into the mouth.
Living in the late Devonian period, 380 million to 360 million years ago, the Dunn's fish is one of the largest shield fish ever recorded, its head and neck covered with thick "armor", this predatory fish can reach 10 meters long and weigh up to 3.6 tons, and is a top predator that dominates the aquatic ecosystem of the time. Other shield-skinned fish of the same era are rarely comparable in body shape to Dun's fish. Their strong bite force gives them the ability to prey on other armored aquatic life, sharks and arthropods in the ocean. If the Dunn's fish had survived to this day, it would still be a terrible predator. A scientist said, "If the largest Dunn's fish is to face the 6-meter-long great white shark, I can bet that the winner will be the Dunn's fish." ”
Due to their heavy armor, Dunn's fish may swim slowly, and they may often wander around the coastal waters, but sometimes swim to the open ocean, it is not known. The surviving fossil bones of Dunn's fish are usually only the front part protected by the shield armor, so the appearance of the second half of this ancient fish is not very certain.
The fossil record shows that as the most powerful carnivore of its time, Dunn's fish was not picky about food, and various fish, including sharks, as well as cephalopods, were within its range. According to the bite marks found on the armor of the Dunn's fish fossil, it is speculated that as long as there is a chance, the Dunn's fish will even eat the same kind. Studies have shown that in the process of adulthood, with the change of eating habits, the morphology of the jaw will change, and it seems to be more suitable for preying on various soft aquatic animals as a child, and by adulthood, it has the great power to bite through the bone armor of hard animals, and it is more able to cope with Yuru when preying on prey that struggles fiercely against resistance, such as other shield fish.
In 1956, in honor of David Dunkel, curator of the paleovertebrates at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History at the time, the paleontology was named Dunk's fish.
<h1>Monty Python: The largest python ever made</h1>
Scientists have found a 600,000-year-old fossil of an ancient crocodile in a huge open-pit coal mine in northern Columbia, South America, and also found a huge python skeleton there, which scientists named the Serejon Titan Python. The now-extinct prehistoric python is far more terrifying than the prehistoric python depicted in Hollywood movies, which is conservatively estimated to weigh up to 1140 kilograms and is about 15 meters long from the tip of the nose to the tip of the tail. However, although its appearance is terrible, it is a non-toxic python similar to a water anaconda, living in the tropical rainforest of South America 60 million years ago. The discoverer said, "It's the largest python ever seen in the world, and it's so wide that it wants to come into the office and eat me, but it's hard to squeeze in from the doorway." ”
Scientists point out that 60 million years ago, the tropical ecosystems of South America were very different from those of today, and although they were a tropical rainforest like today, they were hotter than they are today. In this unique climatic condition, the bodies of cold-blooded reptiles grow very large. Therefore, the world's largest python can be said to be unprecedented.
The prey of the largest python ever built was also surprisingly large. Crocodile fossils found along with giant python fossils belong to the smallest member of an extinct family of ancient crocodiles, an ancient relative of modern crocodiles whose members are usually up to 6 meters long and have long forceps-like snouts that feed on fish. The newly discovered crocodile has a shorter snout, suggesting that they have a wider range of foods, including frogs, lizards, snakes and small mammals. Scientists named the newly discovered species Cerrejonisuchus improcerus, which is about 2 meters long.
Scientists previously thought that this ancient crocodile family only began to flourish in the early Tertiary Period after the mass extinction of dinosaurs, but this discovery shows that this crocodile family existed before the mass extinction event and survived the mass extinction event, while many other marine reptiles such as the dragon and the plesiosaur disappeared completely.
For the Serejon Titan Python, the two-meter-long Cerrejonisuchus improcerus is the prey they can easily hunt. In fact, in the tropical jungle today, the story of the anaconda devouring the caiman is also a frequent occurrence. Caimans are members of a crocodile family and live in the Jungle of the Amazon.
<h1>Megaloid: Mammoths whose population extinctions affect the climate</h1>
A new study of prehistoric climate change suggests that early humans had an impact on Earth's climate change when they hunted the last mammoths on Earth, thousands of years before humans began burning coal and oil: as the mammoths that chewed on leaves disappeared, dwarf birch forests spread rapidly around the Arctic, large swaths of sunlight-reflecting ground became increasingly dim, and temperatures in the Arctic rose. As vegetation moves north, the "albedo effect" has an impact on the climate, with dark landscapes that absorb more sunlight replacing snowy lands that reflect sunlight in large quantities, and the climate becomes warmer and warmer. By the late Ice Age, global temperatures rose and the glaciers that once covered much of the Northern Hemisphere retreated dramatically, and it was during this period that mammoths began to become extinct. Experts pointed out that if mammoth hunters accelerate Arctic warming, this will be the earliest example of human influence on the climate, with the advent of the agricultural era 7,000 years ago, humans also changed the earth's climate through deforestation and crop cultivation.
The mammoth, scientifically known as Mammuthus primigenius, also known as the tundra mammoth, is an extinct behemoth. Mammoth skeletons and frozen carcasses have been found from northern North America to northern Eurasia, especially in Siberia. The earliest mammoth samples found were found in Eurasian sediments 150,000 years ago. Mammoths disappeared from much of the region around 10,000 years ago in the late Pleistocene, and only a small fraction still lived on Wrangel Island in the northeastern Soviet Union, only to finally become extinct around 1700 BC. Scientists are uncertain whether the mammoth extinction will be more affected by climate change or more by human hunting. It is also believed that it was the comet that struck the Earth that caused the mammoth to disappear from the Earth.
Unlike most other prehistoric animals, mammoth carcasses are usually not turned into true fossils, but are better preserved in their organic state, in part because of the icy climatic conditions of their habitats, habitats, and their sheer size. Thus, in an anatomic sense, mammoths are the most understood prehistoric vertebrates in humans.
Mammoths are mainly divided into two subspecies, one living in the high latitudes of the Arctic and the other living in a wider regional range. Mammoths, though large, are not too large to imagine, and are not much taller than today's Asian elephants, but they weigh much heavier. Fully grown adult male elephants can reach heights of 2.8 to 4 meters, shorter mammoths can be between 1.8 and 23 meters tall, and mammoths can weigh up to 8 tons.
Mammoths have some prominent features that adapt to cold climates, most notably the thick, fluffy layer of long hairs, up to 1 meter long. Mammoth fur is similar to that of musk oxen, and in summer it is hairless and molted. Mammoths have far smaller ears than modern elephants, with the largest of the mammoths found so far only 30 centimeters long, compared to 180 centimeters long for modern African elephants. Mammoths are no thicker in skin than modern elephants, but are dotted with sebaceous glands that secrete oil, and the subcutaneous fat is up to 8 centimeters thick, helping to keep warm like blubber. Similar to reindeer and musk cattle, mammoths' hemoglobin has also adapted to cold climates, and three variants of genetic genes have greatly improved their ability to quickly transport oxygen throughout the body to prevent freezing.
Siberian natives have long ago discovered the remains of mammoths and collected mammoth tusks for ivory trading. They considered it to be a giant beast like a giant mole or a hippopotamus. In the early 17th century, reports of mammoths occasionally circulated to Europe, where Europeans often saw them as biblical stories, and the word "mammoth," the local language with the meaning of "behemoth," first entered the English vocabulary during this period.
British scientist Hans Sloan first studied the teeth of mammoths from Siberia in 1728 and identified them for the first time as an elephant, not an animal like a hippopotamus. In 1796, the French scientist Georges Cuvier first discovered that the mammoth was not a modern elephant that migrated to the Arctic, but a completely new species. Most importantly, he believes the species is extinct and no longer exists on Earth. Cuvier's views were not widely accepted at the time, and it was not until 1828 that Joshua Brooks identified it as a distinct species and classified it as a mammoth.
<h1>Fossils of giant prehistoric penguins were discovered</h1>
American scientists recently announced that they have found a fossil of an extinct penguin in Peru. This giant penguin, which lived for at least 36 million years, doesn't look at all like a modern penguin in a black-and-white tuxedo.
This huge prehistoric bird is 1.5 meters tall and has a long, narrow beak with pointed grooves. It was twice as large as today's emperor penguins and was the largest penguin ever found. Scientists have named it "Inkayacuparacasensis," meaning "King of Water." Scientists studying the fossilized bones of this prehistoric penguin have found that the fins and body shapes that made the penguin a master swimmer have evolved a long time ago, and the neatly arranged thick feathers make the penguin's fins harder and more streamlined, while also isolating the body from water and air.
The feather-covered finned limbs of this prehistoric penguin are clearly preserved on the fossils, and the marks of the feathers are clearly visible. Scientists believe that the feathers of this prehistoric penguin are most likely gray or reddish-brown. Scientists have known before that the "black coat" of modern penguins and the "white shirt" that contrast with the abdomen are the result of modern evolution. So why did penguins evolve to be the color they are today? Scientists speculate that the change in the color of penguin feathers may be related to differences in ecology, either to meet the need to regulate body temperature, or to cope with the emergence of new predator seals. Scientists also speculate that the requirement for diving may have influenced changes in the penguin's feather pigment, making it evolve into today's black and white.