Hundreds of millions of years ago, way before dinosaurs filled the earth, a huge fish armed with fatal fangs filled the waters of Gondwana, an ancient supercontinent in the south. The remains of this prehistoric fish species have now been unearthed.
360-Million-Year-Old Fossils of Huge Prehistoric Fish
According to Live Science, the fish has a length of around 9 feet, which makes it the largest documented bony fish from the Late Devonian period. It was examined by a team of researchers who published their study in the PLOS One journal.
The fish also had a predatory nature. This led the researchers to dub it Hyneria udlezinye, which is the IsiXhosa for the one that consumes others. The language was an indigenous one widely spoken in the South African region where the bones were spotted.
The earliest clues to this prehistoric fish's existence were first discovered in 1995 when the researchers unearthed isolated and fossilized scales at the Waterloo Farm excavation site. This area is located close to Makhanda.
In their recent study, the researchers were finally able to piece together the skeleton of a newly discovered tristichopterid species.
Study co-author, paleontologist, and research associate Robert Gess says that the journey to discovering the scales' origins has been quite a long one.
The remains revealed that the fish species was indeed predatory. Gess says that the finds were toward its back, which is an ecological quality of a predator that lies while waiting. The predator fish could have lurked in the darkness and waited for its prey to pass by.
Live Science reports that the predator fish likely preyed on tetrapods, which are a four-legged group of species that led to the lineage of humans. According to study author and professor Per Ahlberg, these tristichopterids evolved into predators that likely fed on human ancestors.
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Tristichopterids
According to IFL Science, this species closely resembles Hyneria lindae, which is another tristichopterid. This species was discovered at an archaeological site in Pennsylvania, which also used to be part of the Euramerica supercontinent back in the Late Devonian period.
These fossils unearthed at Waterloo Farm serve as the first evidence that Hyneria dwelled in Gondwana. The study also shows that these huge tristichopetrids did not just live in tropical areas but also throughout the continent and even in polar areas.
According to Live Science, most of the discovered fossils of tristichopterids were excavated in Australia. This skewed perception of animal distribution.
Because Australia was dominantly tropical and because the well-sampled areas from this era and from Gondwana are from Australia, specialists assumed that tristichopteris may have originated from Australia as well, along Gondwana's tropical coast.
Now, this is the first time researchers have found giant tristichopterid remains in what was a polar area back then.
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