Purussaurus - Ancient Animal

today on north o2 we are going to be talking about purussaurus this animal is the largest crocodilian of all time though it was bigger than many dinosaurs it actually existed only 20 million years ago before we talked about how giant this animal really was we need to talk about its origins this animal belongs to the caimans subfamily Caymans are distinguished by their slender teeth bone structure and stiff hides they first appeared in the early Paleogene about 64 million years ago after the dinosaurs and many other animals were killed off there are many open niches in the environment the crocodilians living in south america at the time are considered to be more closely related to alligators than crocodiles this means they belong to the family alligator a day and in the case of purussaurus they belong to the subfamily came in a the first came in to appear in the fossil record was eel came in cabbar Ensis it was a relatively small animal but it was unique from other alligator heads because of its smaller size slender teeth and different skull structure though the first Caymans were smaller animals that didn't stop the future genus from growing to a monstrous size 44 million years later these came and began to become giant there are three species of purussaurus from the Miocene the first species appeared in the early Miocene and the last one died out during the end of the Miocene ProSource brasiliensis was the largest species of caiman and also probably the largest crocodilian ever some other crocodilians are close like sarcosuchus and Deinosuchus but purussaurus seems to be quite larger than those species not that many fossils have been found of this animal so it's hard to come up with an accurate weight estimate it is estimated to weigh a monster is eighteen thousand six hundred pounds lower estimates claim a more conservative measure at twelve thousand pounds which would still be many times larger than the heaviest reptile today which is the saltwater croc the length of this animal could have been 41 feet long but most likely would have been somewhat shorter what I find amazing about this animal is its unique skull shape it had a very short and blunt muzzle unlike many other crocodilians from modern and prehistoric times I could not find a real answer to this but I could speculate I think the muzzle was so the jaw would have been very strong towards the outer teeth when you have a long muzzle the teeth farthest away from the hinge have the least amount of power perhaps this animal needed the power to take down the large animals that preyed on after all had a bite force stronger than t-rex so needed the extra power to grab and kill its prey so let's look at the extension species of caiman to try to figure out the reason for this short snapped the broad snout of came and also possesses us now similar to burrows soros this animal has a pretty typical diet for a caiman but they also have been observed eating fruits and plant material the extent of their omnivorous behavior is unknown but perhaps their snout has something to do with eating plants rather than animals risk source also possesses a short snout and it has also been speculated to have been omnivorous perhaps that supplemented its diet with aquatic plants when the food was harder to find or plants may have been a large part of its diet that is one explanation I have come up with one thing we know for sure is that this animal ate meat and lots of it it is estimated that it required 90 pounds of meat a day they may not sound like a lot to you but imagine needing that every single day now let's look at the dental Rhea the spiesse teeth vary in length but they tend to be around two inches long they're curved slightly backwards and have ridges that resemble Zippo dots the teeth in the back portion of the mouth are flattened on the tip and roughly conical this would help the animal break bones and eat the whole carcass of a prey item what animals were these beasts preying upon there are many large and small animals in this environment glyptodont marine mammals giant sloths and no-tongue gila mammals that convergently evolved into familiar looking animals we're all prey for this monster Briss horse had its eyes and nostrils on the top of its head so it was likely an ambush predator like modern-day crocs it would wait for animals to approach to drink water and then boom it would strike and drag an animal down into the water Tessa Vandana news found that ProSource could perform the death role but it would have had to do it in fairly deep water there's no doubt that this animal was the apex predator of its time the other land predators were relatively small and no other group of large Crocs lived nearby an interesting thing I was thinking about is what if this animal went out to sea modern-day Caymans live in fresh or saltwater and it is likely that prayer source could do the same the reason why I think this would be cool is because of the large carnivorous cetaceans and sharks that lived in the seas around South America for example the amazingly big live iton hunted the waters around South America and so did Megalodon if her source were to travel to sea or just have an environment near the sea maybe they could find themselves in a fight with one of those beasts I find this very unlikely because pura Soares lived more inland and those two animals that I mentioned would have no reason to attack or be near purussaurus the thing I find most amazing about this animal is how it lived during the Cenozoic if you were to ask me when I think the biggest crocodilian that ever lived I would definitely say the Mesozoic era because just think of how many large dinosaurs there were to prey on but of course this animal lived in the Cenozoic rather than the Mesozoic which was a huge surprise to me when I found that out also just the pure brutality of this animal is shocking the size the power and the huge blunt jaws are amazing so now let's talk about why these animals went extinct the Miocene era ended because of an overall cooling of the climate which caused the forests to be replaced with grasslands though this doesn't answer my question directly it makes a lot of sense who incidentally appear surahs disappeared right at the end of the Miocene it was never seen again the reason for this is because when a predator gets this big it is considered to be highly specialized this animal was designed to kill large bodied animals and when they start to disappear themselves they were unable to find food the smaller more fit caimans and alligators were the ones who survived to see the next epoch any animal that is as special as ProSource is bound to go extinct as soon as a large change happens and that is the unfortunate truth of evolution the earth nowadays seems kind of lame compared to our prehistoric past but that's why you came to my channel so you can watch videos about them so I think this is a good ending point thanks for watching and I hope you liked the video suggest new videos in the comment section down below check out my subreddit and comment any scientific inaccuracies I may have made in this video this has been your host North o2 and I'll see you on the next one bye [Music] [Music]

Channel: NORTH 02

Views: 13,625

Rating: 4.9323673 out of 5

Keywords: saur, saurus, dino, dinosaur, purussarus, purussaurus, croc, crocdilian, crocodile, alligator, caiman, biggest, largest, teeth, miocene, paleo, paleontology, fossil, bone, ancient, reptile, prehistoric, million, mya, science, discovery

Id: HhQlCy2QJZs

Length: 6min 51sec (411 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 09 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/NineWorldsSeries]

That image is not a Purusaurus