Discovery.Ch.Prehistoric.Predators.Of.the.past.2of3..Blood.in.the.Water

they were among nature's most successful experiments in advanced weaponry cleaver jaws jet propulsion armor plating their mouths are big enough to take a swallow a small child whole each creature was a predatory pioneer there is a tremendous amount of carnage going on constantly there's nothing like it in the animal kingdom they perfected the tools for hunting killing dismembering and devouring prey and then they passed them all prehistoric assassins what makes a predator deadly the lethal weapon it uses to close the deal and when nature perfects a weapon it keeps it even after the killer disappears this process of recycling traits called convergent evolution is as old as nature itself ever since life exploded in the Precambrian period the ocean has been a testing ground for predators looking to gain an edge on their prey as time goes on the most innovative designs for destruction become apparent one of the things we see throughout the history of life on our planet as sort of this continuous arms race between predators and prey only at the very bottom of the ecosystem did you have plant eaters and that sort of thing everything else ate everything else 370 million years ago in the shallow seas of the Devonian period one marine assassins stood out above all others Dunkel osteitis his predatory advantage his lethal weapon was second to nothing a new kind of jaw that packed one of the most powerful bites of all time but what prompted this innovation Armour most Devonian prey had it including plated fish called placa d'oeuvres as soon as there were predators animals evolved protection from those predators some sort of armor for some kind of hardshell they range from small armored organisms that were snuffling around on the bottom feeding on detritus and things up to the large apex predators like Dunkleosteus this was the original jaws a pioneer at using these revolutionary structures called jaws which evolved 410 million years ago from bones in their gills jaws are weapons that open wide allowing predators to attack and devour much larger prey but a jaw can also be used as a hammer to help crack a shell or hombre a hammer is a handy tool but Dunkleosteus had an edge on other jaw Blackadder's one that made it among the most deadly predators of all time so tongue Colossus represents one of the first times that these predators have been able have developed a means of actually breaking down a larger prey item once you can do that you can start eating anything in your environment and uncle osseous did one of the largest of the plaka d'oeuvres it grew to an estimated twenty feet in length and weighed as much as an elephant its back half was a mass of sleek muscular tissue and its fearsome four foot wide skull was made of bony armor place.but Dunkleosteus is formidable advantage its jaw was enhanced by specialized plates in its mouth danke las diez had very large tooth plates dermal Armour but they were arrayed in these meat cleaver like plates that were arranged in the jaws of Dunkleosteus that were used to crush and bite its prey Danka lost his tooth plates appear to be primitive teeth but they are not they were built for shearing rather than what teeth do which is true Kru team had already evolved in the throats of jawless fish powered by throat muscles they chopped up prey for easy digestion but dung Colossus tooth plates were powered by its killer jaws cleaving its prey to bits unlike the gripping bite of predators like Tyrannosaurus the force of Dunkleosteus bike was generated by the shearing action of its cleaver plates similar to the cutting power of a giant pair of scissors in some ways is almost like its own experiment in how to make a jaw armed with this new experiment Dunkel osseous crunched and chopped its way through the bodies of the smaller armored fish of the Devonian period it was probably doing some slow cruising around these reefs looking for a shark or a smaller placket or him to feed upon when it spotted a prey item it would have then thrust that tail in a couple of rapid tail strokes darting toward the pray once Dunkleosteus was close to its prey it would snap its jaws open with lightning speed and how fast they opened may have been just as critical to the kill as how fast they shut but how do scientists figure out the jaw speed of a long-dead predator with a little help from his 370 million year-old bow marquest me and his colleague Phil Anderson studied a group of fossilized Dunkel osseous skulls they custom fit them with foam rubber muscles and entered their muscle measurements into a computer model and we realized that Dunkleosteus was able to open its jaws quite fast something like a tenth of a second Dunkel osseous is jaw speed allowed something unexpected to happen suction which pulled its prey towards it then before the prey had time to escape Danka loss mrs. cleaver jaws would make the kill upper and lower were able to slide past one another and that's when the high bite force would have been activated to bite a piece off of that prey item one of the characteristics of large predators is often that they'll disable their prey by biting a piece off and then consuming it very much like to meet cleavers chopping the prey the structure of dunka loss teases jaws made him a master of dismemberment Anderson and West neat determined the power of this predators jaws after they discovered a naturally occurring lever system called a four bar linkage that powered its bite this type of linkage is incorporated in heavy equipment like tractors and it increased the strength of Dunkel osseous jaws by a third they actually had a rather robust joint on the back of its skull connecting to the rest of the body this would have allowed its skull to literally move upwards and we've hypothesized that as that skull moved upwards it would have actually forced the lower jaw to move down at the same time by their calculations doctor lost his jaws packed a 5,000 Newton bite force a 5,000 Newton bite force would be like a thousand pound Boulder sitting on top of a meat cleaver sitting on top of your foot by comparison the bite force of a human is as little as a couple hundred Newtons Dunkel osseous bite force was three times that of a great white shark da Colossus his jaw produced the most powerful known bite force ever for any fish living or extinct though incredibly successful for millions of years Dunkel osseous and all the other placa turns disappeared from the earth 360 million years ago but the killing tool that Dunkleosteus pioneered a powerful bladed jaw has been recycled and can be found again and again in predators throughout in time there are a lot of birds whose bills essentially have razor-sharp edges there are certain turtles which have sort of the same kind of beak structure these aspects of dental tool design seem to revolve over and over and over again because they're really effective at slicing meat Megillah gratis the ruthless six-foot assassin that prowled the Ordovician oceans more than 460 million years ago is the largest arthropod that never lived the monstrous ancestor of modern scorpions and spiders but size was only one of its deadly traits megalopolis was a lethal Swiss Army knife capable of attacking prey any number of ways versatility was its weapon monstrous Megillah drafters had six pairs of specialized appendages legs for walking path legs for swimming an articulated tail for propulsion was also spiked for fighting trapping prey front appendages were lined with spikes finally jalisa ride dismembered prey into pieces small enough to shovel into its mouth 450 million years ago paper of the Ordovician era covered in ocean was an alien world there were no mammals there were no reptiles there were no birds there were no amphibians it's primarily a world of invertebrates this primitive ocean filled with trilobites and mollusks was terrorized by versatile heavily armed predators like Megillah gratis and like a weapons system in battle Megillah gratis would have had all its tools ready for deployment the attack started as soon as it spotted its prey this animal had compound eyes just like the eyes of a fly or other arthropods composed of many many tiny little lenses and they're curved and probably provided three-dimensional stereoscopic vision though it could walk on the seafloor it also had the ability to undulate its tail and swim towards its victim once in range it had kill opportunities for devouring its meal Megillah gratis was a mobile trap with appendages that could engulf and imprison its prey unlike anything in any other Europe turrets is the presence of these amazing spines on the appendages long sharp spines these spines were jointed and strong they probably could come together and hold something very effectively but if its prey did escape Megillah grabbed us probably could have also used its spine as a sieve it might have been a very good strategy for a predator to just plow into that mud and kind of rake it through using the spines as a basket and then picking out the delectable items once it grasped its prey Megillah gratis as many arms began shoving the helpless meal towards its mouth but instead of teeth Megillah grab disease last set of appendages which elisa loi powerful pincers beside the mouth they didn't chew the prey but the little chill asuri underneath we'd start the chewing mechanism start tearing it up we're not sure exactly how those appendages would have been used to manipulate the prey whether or not they would have torn the animal open to get inside the soft parts or whether or not that was simply just quenched it and digested it and if the front pincers needed reinforcements to defend its dinner the tail could swoop in the three pincers of the tale most likely move in and out as well as the third one up and down they could grasp together very effectively and hold something very tightly I like to think of the idea of the tail bending up over the head like a modern scorpion and basically grasping something and flinging it away from from attacking the the the front end megalo gratis disappeared 450 million years ago but it's incredibly successful predatory body plan it's lethal Swiss Army knife array of weaponry survives to this day recycled and redeployed it is thought that scorpions living on land evolved from marine Europe turrets scorpions and spiders inherited Megillah graft is's grasping and trapping tools helping to make arthropods the most plentiful animals on earth today speed it can be a killing tool as deadly as sharp teeth and powerful claws 450 million years ago this gigantic hunter 30-foot camera saris dominated the Ordovician ocean it cruised the waters over what is now North America Europe and Asia like a primitive submarine encased in a protective shell for defense this soft body cephalopod had strong flexible squid-like limbs for grabbing prey it had a large complex eye and a sharp powerful beat light mouth but all of this was powered by some mighty plumbing a jet propulsion system that allowed it to hunt down anything it wanted mighty cameras Ariza's killing tool was this jet propulsion you can imagine these very large cephalopods swimming quite agile e in the water column as big huge telephone poles a swimming telephone pole may be a little hard to imagine but there is a modern cephalopod that provides insight into how ancient camera saris worked this is a shell of a pearly Nautilus and it is the only modern cephalopod that has a hard shell it's coiled but otherwise it's very similar to our creature which is basically a long cone pointed at one end open at the other this part of the comb which is called a frag McCone is divided into spaces the other end where the animal was the soft parts is called the body chamber the soft tissue looked and functioned much like its cephalopod ancestors there would have been an animal here with lots of arms hanging out prominent eyes probably and a jaw mechanism a big jaw mechanism but how exactly do cephalopods like camera saris use jet propulsion to hunt down prey there is a structure that comes out here that's a hollow tube and the animal takes in water on either side of the body and sorts the water out this thing which is called a hyponym so this creature if it were swimming would squirt squirt squirt they have a specific organ known as a Sai funcle' which is used to control gases in their chambers of their shell it allows them to control their buoyancy allows them to rise in the water column as well as to sink in the water column cameras Eris's accelerating Jets helped satisfy its a big appetite by making it faster than its prey our creature was the biggest guy on the block this is a tiny specimen and you can see how long it is they were so big they could mess with everybody else if they saw fit to fill that big body up one of its favorite meals was another super predator Megillah gratis Megillah grafters likely knew not to tangle with the huge predator but camera saris pursue its victim with its prey here camera saris would deploy its many tentacles when the animal is looking for food it stretches out the tentacles as though it's trying to feel all parts of the environment eventually one or more of the tentacles will touch the prey at which point it quickly will surge forward and engulf the prey Megillah gratis did not give up easily but it would have been no match for cameras Eris's crushing pink the beak of camera saris similar to an upside-down parrot speak very large camera saris would have been incredibly strong and would have probably had no problem crushing the hard exoskeletons of some of these arthropods though powerful and fast camera saris went extinct roughly 450 million years ago but some cephalopods must have survived because today's squid and octopus all descend from a common half billion year old ancestor and not surprisingly these modern predators possess the same jet propulsion that made camera saris such a terror the Jurassic era produced such an abundance of lethal predators that the oceans were a virtual stew of assassins from sharks and rays to early crocodiles joining this deadly crew was a massive lie applauded on which patrolled the Jurassic seas 160 million years ago over what is now Europe and Russia a killing machine this maneuverable short-necked plesiosaur was armed with 7-foot jaws lined with teeth as long as those of a t-rex but it was Lyle or Dawn's surprising mobility drawn from its for muscular paddles that made it such a deadly assassin it had two distinct modes cruising and turbo burst killing speed both helped it cut through the water and close in on its prey and at 30 feet and three times it didn't take no for an answer it was the biggest of the baddest of the large predators in the Jurassic sea ways there's nothing that like lurid on as an adult has to worry about so life lurid on is gonna rule the Jurassic seas in its time the really unique thing about life lurid on is it flies with four wings under the one there's no other known predator that's ever done but just how did Liopleurodon fly using its four paddles one of the problems of working with fossils the animals are dead so either just a ghost without everything else that goes with in his lab at Vassar College in upstate New York hello there welcome to the bio robotics lab and Vassar College come on in John long breathes life back into Liopleurodon with the help of plastic circuits and batteries with a robot we can put meat and bones and brain back onto the ghosts I'll grab the flippers if you guys will just pull her out John dubbed his super predator robot Maddock roughly the size of a baby Lisle Oregon Madeleine was equipped with four flippers she was turned loose in the swimming pool to answer the question of just how Maya plura Don pursued its prey if you look at honors or you look at sea lines or you look at Turtles all these critters have gone back in the water they tend to when they're cruising around just use one set of flippers the size and structure of liya pleura Don's flippers indicate that they were all being used for propulsion but this is not the case what we found really surprised us with robot madeline you're not swimming any faster once you get up to speed then you are with two flippers so it looks like four flippers were key for maneuverability and acceleration and not swim in fast behaviors that come into play when liya plura dong hunts and kills and with relatively limited variety among the many creatures that inhabited the Jurassic oceans Liopleurodon would have likely been forced to make a meal of similar Plesiosaurus it could not afford to be picky nor could it expend more energy than it could get from its kill no creature can energy matters of biology right so that's part of the logic behind saying you know what why pour it on if they were smart weren't cruising around with four flippers they were just using two so it's incredibly expensive to move through water Liopleurodon eyes faced forward like most hunters so the good track prey and once it got close Liopleurodon was ready to kick all four flippers into gear if you have poor flippers that means likely you're going to be good at hitting the turbo button and getting a quick burst of acceleration laia plura dawn would get all its flippers involved in thrusting steering twisting and turning giving it a surprising amount of mobility we just take that momentum you have is a big critter and transfer that into a really cool maneuver and that's going to throw off prey they don't expect something large and relatively slow moving to be maneuverable at the last minute in the struggle Liopleurodon would add another brutal advantage massive jaws crammed with teeth the teeth are very large they're three or four inches long the root of the tooth is actually much longer almost three times the length of the crown so not only are the teeth large but they have giant roots that hold the teeth into the skull very tightly it's not repeatedly biting something is just holding onto something and working those teeth into the body now once live player on has killed something it has to break that carcass up and it probably did that the same way the pocket I would by twisting around biting off big chunks and then swallowing the chunks a true sea monster Liopleurodon dominated the oceans for five million years although there are no vicious predators quite like lye applaud on swimming today sees there is an unlikely parallel out there right now what's thought to be the best modern and launched will please a source and there at sea lines sea lions are mammals and their osteology shapes of their bones are completely different than what you see in lion plural however it's thought that the fin stroke the plesiosaur is used is very similar to what you see in series convergent evolution recycles good ideas and display but occasionally something extraordinary happens in the battle for survival predators brandish such terrifying weapons as teeth claws and jaws but even a longneck can be an assassin's tool when it's combined with a solid 10-ton body elasmosaurus was 45 feet long from tip to tail and legal despite its small head and jaws that's because it used its neck to attack out of nowhere this neck was the longest of any sea creature that ever lived twice the length of a giraffe's with ten times more vertebrae just one of many long necked elasmosaurus that dominated the ocean for 35 million years during the late cretaceous period from 100 to 65 million years ago 85% of the planet's surface was underwater monsters ruled what little land remain but most of the action was taking place in all that water the Western interior Seaway a shallow ocean that covered the middle of North America was a violent one the Western interior Seaway was truly the most dangerous Seaway that ever existed there is a tremendous amount of carnage going on constantly in the midst of this carnage one creature stood out for its killing style this is elasmosaurus plenteous it's the first elasmosaurus aound collected in Kansas in 1867 and 1868 it's also one of the largest of the elasmosaurus that are known today they were one of the longest probably the heaviest creatures swimming in the seas of the Cretaceous there's nothing like it in the animal kingdom even you know when we're talking about the long necked dinosaurs that had happened there at about the same time they only have about a dozen or more vertebra in their neck and compared to this guy was 72 there's really no comparison between what Mother Nature was doing here but just what was Mother Nature up to over the 125 million years that plesiosaurs swam Earth's seas new generations kept adding vertebra to their ever-growing necks ultimately reaching an unthinkable total of 72 in elasmosaurus more than half of its body was pure neck with a very small head and that speaks a lot about its feeding strategy a strategy that was the culmination of millions of years of evolution ocean-dwelling plesiosaurs first evolved from shore dwelling reptiles roughly 235 million years ago most of the world is actually covered in ocean so it represents a huge opportunity consequently we've seen repeated reinvasion of aquatic or marine environments by animals that were originally on the land over millions of years evolution re-engineered them for success in the marine environment in many cases what we've seen is that the limbs actually become expanded and actually become paddles in the and the limbs become the major propulsive organ a deliberate swimmer elasmosaurus propelled itself with four huge paddles adaptations of its four legs but when elasmosaurus flew along in coastal waters it was cruising for small prey the skull is relatively small the jaws are relatively narrow and that limits these the size of the maximum size of the fish to say something three or four inches in diameter maybe 15 inches long and so something as large as elasmosaurus weighing several tons is almost going to have to eat continuously in order to fuel this huge body small-headed elasmosaurus hunted only small fish but small fish had developed a defense against predators schooling if one set of eyes is good for detecting a predator than hundreds of pairs in a school should be even better the idea of being one of many is a very effective predator defense system and what we see is the Predators that will actually evolve to deal with these schools of fish this was a last my sources challenge but how did something this large sneaked up on a school of weary fish fish's eyes are basically looking up and forward to say they prey on things at the surface - and because of that particular feature they have a blind spot Milou them and that was just where elasmosaurus would lurk it could dive down in the dark and look up at its prey and if there was a school of fish above it it could easily recognize the silhouettes elasmosaurus is skin most likely was dark on its topside camouflaging it to blend in with the depths but it's lethal weapon its neck allowed it to be in two places at once the advantage of the long neck is that the body is 15 foot below where the head is and would be basically invisible the last three or four feet of the neck unable to the head to be moved back and forth in a way to grab the fish once I got close at last my Saurus would rise out of the gloom like a lever popping its head into the school to pick off a few unsuspecting fish their teeth are interlocking is kind of a fish basket so they grab and fish and swallow it immediately they wouldn't be chewing there wouldn't be any tearing of flesh or tearing things apart the whole fish would travel down its long neck and into a gizzard a pouch containing stones the reptile had swallowed that enabled them to grind up their food relatively quickly and probably helped in digesting pretty rapidly and again fueling this big body to to swim through the oceans for millions of years policía soars long necks made them virtually invisible and invincible killers only the global extinction event 65 million years ago likely triggered by a massive asteroid impact could finally end there still be waves elasmosaurus is the exception that proves the rule of convergent evolution of nature recycling effective weapons today there's nothing on land or in the oceans with a body plan like that of elasmosaurus even plant-eating giraffes have only seven vertebrae in their necks the same as humans and most other mammals swans necks have the most vertebrae topping out at 25 enabling them to reach places shorter neck ducks can't what do you do with your a prehistoric assassin with a mouth as big as your stomach if you're as if activist you stuff yourself until you burst literally this monsters gaping mouth was its deadliest tool and its fatal flaw though it grew to be the biggest fish of its day reaching lengths of 20 feet ZAF activist was built for speed with wing-like pectoral fins a wide blade of a tail and a narrow back end it also had a big mouth full of sharp oversized teeth it hunted the North American sea ways for 35 million years success by any standard but it was most notable for its outsized appetite to fill up that big mouth is a fact Ernest ate the biggest fish it could possibly ingest and it ate them home a swift and efficient predatory adaptation over time it got larger and larger and larger because it was very successful at what it was doing but success clearly came at a price there are at least fifteen or sixteen specimens now of large effectiveness that died within a few hours at most a day of consuming a large fish the mystery this guy is the fact that so many of them died with a full stomach today the fact inist fossils are particularly well preserved in the ancient Cretaceous sea beds of western Kansas they are the most common of the large predators found in the Kansas Chalk this is a smoky hill chalk it's a sea bottom deposited 85 million years ago at a time when most of the middle of North America was covered by an ancient ocean it contains the bones the fossils of some of the most dangerous predators of that time it was a tough place to live we've got about six foot here we're looking at 13 to 14 species of fact in us this is a big fish big fish their mouths are big enough that they could swallow a small child whole the fact anissa's throat would expand as the mouth opened courtesy of a series of small bones this helped increase the volume of the interior of the mouth while swallowing prey the lower jaw fit back inside the upper jaws whence effectiveness closed its mouth chances are he had a target of a certain size of prey animal that would give it maximum nourishment for minimum risk and that size for 12 to 15-foot fish was a four to six foot prey animal you would eat one fish be done and go away nobody knows how long it took the fact inist to digest an intact fish but this strategy was extremely efficient it reduces the number of meals and the energy expended in hunting they would eat one prey animal at a time and then slip into a period of very little activity until they needed to eat again that was their very successful survival strategy but why have some fossils turned up with a super-sized meal inside them could their eyes have been too big for their stomachs I think visual tack was an important part of the faculties because they really had very large ice for the size of the animal it was also very fast and if it was quite a ways away from its prey could actually position itself in front of the prey it would have been able to close in on its prey a five-foot Gillig Asst with brutal efficiency they would attack from below with that upward-pointing mouth I would be able to open it at the last minute too late for the Gila cos to realize what was happening the Gila 'kiss word literally be sucked into so fact anissa's mouth and at that moment be trapped by some fact anissa's teeth the teeth are huge in relation to the size of the jaw and creation of the size of the animal after it sucked the fish in part way those long teeth would hold it would grab it and puncture it and in some cases kill it so that wouldn't struggle so much but why did this brutal attack sometimes prove fatal for this effectiveness as well from time to time the prey animal was maybe just a hair too large and or too active and may have seriously caused the damage that killed the this effectiveness or maybe this effectiveness was not fully armed at the moment it swallowed its prey maybe its teeth were in a middle replacement stage and they weren't able to stun it as much as it normally would have so when that large prey fish was going down the the gullet it actually managed to do some serious anatomical damage to the internal organs of the effectiveness whatever the cause of death surfactant is was a voracious hunter the ability to consume large fish hole was the deadly trait that made this killer an apex predator but despite its success enos went extinct along with most of the large predators at the end of the Cretaceous period yet its design lives on today a fish aptly named the Black Swamp uses the same killing tool that allows it to gorge on fish larger than itself and likes effectiveness this extreme form of predation also has its downside occasional death for the swallow super predators sit at the top of the food chain because of their specialized weaponry honed by eons of evolution the tools that made these aquatic hunters efficient killers still dominate Earth's oceans even though their original donors are long gone recycled these tools have simply been installed in later predatory Marvel's because nature wastes none of the weapons of its very best assassins

Channel: King Ashur

Views: 892,035

Rating: 4.670095 out of 5

Keywords: Discovery, Ch, Prehistoric, Predators.Of.the.past.2of3., Blood, in, the, Water

Id: X7M_4isI1ZM

Length: 41min 51sec (2511 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 28 2012