Let's talk about Dunkleosteus of all things. This fish, (also known as Dinichthys), was featured on the first two episodes of the ‘Walking with Sea Monsters’ trilogy, (made by Impossible Pictures in 2003), but little else, to my knowledge. What next?
It isn't easy to make an extinct fish sound exciting, but because Dunkleosteus wasn't just an extinct fish, but a giant extinct fish the size of a modern school bus, it has a good chance of being so. Where to begin?
Well… there's a tendency to have it compared to the Megalodon, but that isn’t quite right; the giant shark was still better than ‘the Dunk’ was; why?
Because, the baseline answer, is that the Megalodon was a more derived fish predator out of the two; it existed in the Miocene and the Pliocene, aka the Cenozoic, (about the same time that our direct ancestors descended from the trees and became our direct ancestors – they just didn’t know about that yet), whereas the Dunkleosteus lived during the Devonian, aka in the middle of Paleozoic instead. So what?
So, again, if you compare the two fishes the Megalodon just comes across as the better predator – mostly. It may be a cartilaginous fish, but it was still more modern than the bony Dunkleosteus was, (see their times of existence in the paragraph above). More precisely, Megalodon lived during tougher times and it had to be tougher (and smarter) than Dunkleosteus was. Another pause.
Proportionally, the Paleozoic was longer than the Cenozoic is, so far, but while that might be because of the human P.O.V., we do not have any other, (Nessie and Yeti do not want to share theirs right now), so we have to stick with this, and in this timeline P.O.V. the Devonian was more plentiful and less climatically tough than the Miocene and the Pliocene were; that climatic toughness was one of the main causes of the Megalodon’s extinction in the long run, actually.
Secondly, whereas Megalodon usually hunted marine mammals, (up to smallish prehistoric baleen whales), Dunkleosteus hunted smaller and weaker prey – fishes and invertebrates, (since nothing else existed on Earth in the Devonian anyhow), and so, its’ great size was almost overkill from an ecological P.O.V.
There was another animal discussed on the Paleologic that’d done a similar thing during its’ time – the giant snake Titanoboa, which became a giant because the climatic conditions favored it, and because it could, as a cold-blooded animal. While it was a giant, it was also a specialist, specializing in fishes, tortoises, and similar animals, as its skull and jaws show. Dunkleosteus too had a specialized jaws and skull, though its’ specialization was to enable it to eat as much as possible, as quickly as possible: it had no teeth, just giant bony plates, great for shearing, but little else; and it was so big, that it could swallow many of its’ smaller prey just whole, without any shearing or chewing at all.
…Sadly, great bulk also meant a great appetite, even by the standards of cold-blooded animals, and once the climate began to deteriorate, and Earth entered another mass extinction, Dunkleosteus just died out, just as the rest of the placoderms did. (Placoderms being the group of bony fish/vertebrate animals that Dunkleosteus belonged to, scientifically speaking). When the next time period of the Paleozoic – the Carboniferous – rolled-out, the placoderms appeared to have already vanished.
…Yet so had the Megalodon, and so did many other animals and animal dynasties of planet Earth. What is left of them are fossils, obviously, and various online features about the extinct fishes and other animals, which you can still buy, online and otherwise, so there's that.
That is all, folks! See you all soon!
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