Sea Floor Fossils Revealed Atop Swiss Alps

"The tooth is particularly interesting because it could possibly -- but unlikely -- represent the largest animal to ever inhabit Earth."

"The Alps have a very complicated structure, with giant slabs of rock consisting of former sea floor, called nappes, piled on top of each other by the African plate pushing into the European plate."

"The nappe that the ichthyosaurs come from is the highest in the pile. This piling up happened in the last 35 million years or so." 

"Maybe there are more rests of the giant sea creatures hidden beneath the glaciers."

Martin Sander, paleontologist, University of Bonn 

Illustration of an ichthyosaur. Image: © Daniel Eskridge/Stock.adobe.com

 

The blue whale, an aquatic mammal that grows up to around 30 meters in length is considered to represent the largest-ever creature that Earth has ever seen. New discoveries on long-extinct Triassic ichthyosaurs may now crown these marine reptiles as having been even greater in size than the whales. The giant ichthyosaurs' bodies were shaped elongated with relatively small skulls. That early in the evolutionary cycle they may have borne small brains.

Specimen fossils were discovered back in the 1970s and '80s in the eastern Alps at three sites, in Switzerland. It is only now that after a deep study of the fossils that they are being scientifically described. A study has now been published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Found atop the Chrachenhorn mountain near Davos, one of the fossils was a tooth.

The root of the ichthyosaur tooth fossil, with a diameter of 60mm. Image: Rosi Roth/University of Zurich

 

More complete fossil remains were described as a rib and vertebrae from two ichthyosaur species, one judged to be 21 meters in length, the other about 15 meters; considerable size in any natural lexicon of Earth's creatures, large and small. Dating to around 205 million years back, close to the conclusion of the Triassic Period, the three individual creatures represented by the fossil remains are considered to be the largest of the giant ichthyosaurs to inhabit the oceans, when dinosaurs were starting to dominate land.

They were all found on three mountains in the Swiss Alps at an elevation of 2,740 meters above sea level. The third of the specimens, representing a tooth, was the largest from any ichthyosaur ever found. Its base is 6cm wide with an estimated length of 15cm, testing the imagination to envision a fearsome predator of the day. Last year, a 18-mters-long ichthyosaur was described as having had a tooth with a base 2cm wide.

"Then a tooth 6 centimetres wide could possibly have come from an animal 54 meters in length", suggested Dr.Sander; a formidable, absolutely unimaginable size. Other giant ichthyosaurs evidently ate small fish and squid, sucking them up, engulfing them in their toothless mouths. Fossils formed in an ancient seabed were found on top of mountains resulting from the inexorable, crushing movement of immense plates making up Earth's crust; a process called plate tectonics.

(Photo : Pixabay/Efraimstochter)
Fossils of Giant Sea Monster From 205 Million Years Ago Found 9,000 feet Above Sea Level in the Swiss Alps