What was the First Vertebrate Superpredator?
The first vertebrate superpredator lived 360 – 415 million years ago, in the late Devonian period, when life was just beginning to colonize the land. It was a gigantic, 10 meter (33 ft) carnivorous armored fish, Dunkleosteus telleri. This fish would have been comparable to the size of a school bus. It weighed around 4 tons, and had not only the strongest bite of anything alive at the time, but probably the strongest bite in the history of all life up to today. Computer extrapolations of its likely muscles suggest that it bit with 8,000 pounds per square inch of force at the tip of its fangs. It was also the first predator to evolve the flesh-tearing feature of bladed jaws. Dunkleosteus ate anything that moved. Sharks, fish, invertebrates, and other Dunkleosteus. Its fossils are associated with the half-digested debris of fish corpses. Once it started eating, Dunkleosteus probably didn’t know when to stop. It was easier to have it be evolutionarily programmed to eat as much as it could
The first vertebrate superpredator lived 360 ?415 million years ago, in the late Devonian period, when life was just beginning to colonize the land. It was a gigantic, 10 meter (33 ft) carnivorous armored fish, Dunkleosteus telleri. This fish would have been comparable to the size of a school bus. It weighed around 4 tons, and had not only the strongest bite of anything alive at the time, but probably the strongest bite in the history of all life up to today. Computer extrapolations of its likely muscles suggest that it bit with 8,000 pounds per square inch of force at the tip of its fangs. It was also the first predator to evolve the flesh-tearing feature of bladed jaws. Dunkleosteus ate anything that moved. Sharks, fish, invertebrates, and other Dunkleosteus. Its fossils are associated with the half-digested debris of fish corpses. Once it started eating, Dunkleosteus probably didn’t know when to stop. It was easier to have it be evolutionarily programmed to eat as much as it could a
The first vertebrate superpredator lived 360 — 415 million years ago, in the late Devonian period, when life was just beginning to colonize the land. It was a gigantic, 10 meter (33 ft) carnivorous armored fish, Dunkleosteus telleri. This fish would have been comparable to the size of a school bus. It weighed around 4 tons, and had not only the strongest bite of anything alive at the time, but probably the strongest bite in the history of all life up to today. Computer extrapolations of its likely muscles suggest that it bit with 8,000 pounds per square inch of force at the tip of its fangs. It was also the first predator to evolve the flesh-tearing feature of bladed jaws. Dunkleosteus ate anything that moved. Sharks, fish, invertebrates, and other Dunkleosteus. Its fossils are associated with the half-digested debris of fish corpses. Once it started eating, Dunkleosteus probably didn’t know when to stop. It was easier to have it be evolutionarily programmed to eat as much as it coul
