March 16, 2015

• Bitey Things from the Past

  Do you like 1950s Science Fiction movies?  Probably not so much -- the special effects are less than special.  It is a shame, because there are so many real, terrifying creatures from the past that might have been used.

  

  Recently I wrote about the quetzalcoatlus [ LINK ], and today I give you megalania, birgus tatro, basilosaurus isis, phorusrhacidae, and aegirocassis benmoulae.  If you are a producer of low-budget sci-fi films, you want to pay attention here.

  Megalania
  
  Megalania is the largest lizard that ever lived, 6 meters long, 2/3 of a ton, and venomous.  The "giant ripper" inhabited Australia as recently as 50,000 years ago, at a time when humans were first arriving.  Megalania went extinct about this time, but most naturalists believe humans are not responsible.  Climate change is the more likely cause.  Indeed one cannot imagine how an early aboriginal, armed only with a fire-sharpened spear, would manage to kill it.  The reptile was much stronger and faster than a human, and its scales were each reinforced with bone.

  Birgus tatro: the coconut crab
  
  They eat fruits, rats, other crabs, and yes, coconuts.  They can climb a tree to pick coconuts.  Alternatively, they can take a coconut from the ground, peel it down to a husk nut, carry it up a thirty-foot tree, and drop it to get at the contents.  They can cut holes into coconuts with their strong claws and eat the meat, although it may take several days to open it.

  The coconut crab is not extinct.  It is found on islands across the Indian Ocean and parts of the Pacific Ocean.  At three feet across, it is the largest land-living arthropod in the world.  (Notice how superlatives keep popping up in my narrative.)  It will not kill you, but it will take off your finger without effort.  Some historians believe these arthropods devoured Amelia Earhart's entire body.

  Basilosaurus isis
  
  
  This is an extinct whale (mammal) with a ridiculously powerful bite that lived fifty million years ago.  Researchers Snively, Fahlke, and Walsh demonstrated, by finite element analysis, that Basilosaurus isis exerted the largest bite force ever estimated in a mammal.  It devoured smaller whales, bones and all.  Are you still paying attention, sci-fi movie producers?

  Phorusrhacidae: the terror bird
  
  They were 3 to 9 feet tall and weighed as much as one ton.  Terror birds were meat-eaters who used their powerful bills to strike and kill their prey.  One of these birds had the largest bird skull ever found, measuring 71 cm with a wicked, 45 cm beak.  They were the largest apex predators in South America during the Cenozoic Era, 62 - 2.5 million years ago.  Their modern relatives, the seriemas, kill their prey by smashing it repeatedly against the ground, and this may well be the terror bird method as well.

  Aegirocassis benmoulae
  
  This guy is one of the oldest members of the arthropod family, thus a distant ancestor of cockroaches, shrimps and butterflies.  The creature lived in the Sahara over 480 million years ago when the area was a shallow sea.

  480 million years ago is an unimaginably long time.  There were no reptiles in the Cambrian Era, not even fish with backbones, just a menagerie of preposterous invertebrates.  I blogged about them earlier.  At two meters long, aegirocassis benmoulae would have been the largest animal alive at the time, and far bigger than any arthropod alive today.  Not a predator, it filtered plankton in its mouth parts like a baleen whale.

   

   

  sweet dreams tonight, baby

   

   

  • 6:02 pm
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