Not Exactly Dino-Dolphin, It’s More Like A Marine Reptile Dolphin!

Genuine question, were they as intelligent as dolphins? If so, then they really are scary cause dolphins are scary intelligent and a menace.

If they behaved like dolphins that’d be terrifying

@@Goultardtheiopgod they would definitely body megalodons if they were as smart as dolphins

over-sized dolphins, over-sized (white?) sharks, over-size (killer?) whales.. ... eitherway, would be cool, if those 3 predators lived at the same time and had a "rock, paper & scissors" relationship.., occasionally fighting each other..

There's also the issue that most people know about Ichthyosaurs because of Icthyosaurus, which looks like and probably ate the same stuff as a dolphin, so there is an unconscious perception of "Ichthyosaur=Dolphin" already set there.

@@thenumbah1birdman Yeah it’s like Phosphorosaurus being the popular image of what mosasaurs were like and everyone assuming all mosasaurs were (relatively) tiny small-prey specialists.

⁠itchthyosaurs looks more like sharks/fish

@@thenumbah1birdman I would say that probably for most people, either _Stenopterygius_ or _Opthalmosaurus_ are what they think of when they think of ichthyosaurs. My impression is that _Ichthyosaurus_ itself is actually relatively obscure. Either way, non-thunnosaurian ichthyosaurs seem to have never really made it into the public perception of ichthyosaurs. Which seems blatantly unfair considering how conversely, the only pliosaurs in the public perception seem to be macro-raptorial forms like _Pliosaurus_, _Liopleurodon_ or _Kronosaurus_ (and the various genera commonly subsumed under that moniker), while almost nobody ever talks about the many Pliosaurs that were piscivorous, like _Peloneustes_ and the majority of more basal forms, but even thalassophoneans like _Luskhan_. Somehow there’s this biased view that pliosaurs and mosasaurs were all apex predators, while ichthyosaurs were not, something that, once ingrained in the public consciousness, is hard to get rid of, no matter how many obscure, giant, macrophagous ichthyosaurs get found.

How do you define public and media? I'm certain most people havr absolutly no idea what ichtyosaurs even are.

Frankly I’d argue they had it much worse than hadrosaurs. Most hadrosaurs (with one or two exceptions) and other ornithopods were still viable prey or large predators, just not easy prey (in the same way Buffalo and zebra can put up a serious fight against lions). Ichthyosaurs on the other hand weren’t even the prey but rather the predators in a number of cases.

@@bkjeong4302 My guess is that everyone assumes that they only hunt fish, when that ain't the case at all.

Sadly hollywood only cares about the biggest

we need a new baseline for what older animals were tbh. most of them were much scarier and bigger then hollywood depicts them as. these animals were not peaceful at all. they were all ferocious predators. capable of hunting t rex / megalodon with ease.

@@johnmarkson1998nasty, sharp, pointy teeth gnyar, gnyar, gnyar, crunch

You are goddamn right!

Yeah, just turns out it was a reptile.

*RIGHT THAT DOWN RIGHT THAT DOWN*

@@ruffruggednraw write

Patrick Star : Is mayonnaise an instrument?

there is technically: a movie called Dinoshark, where a monster that I extremely similar to a scaled up ichtyosaur star going on a rampage

@@doragonzx That movie sucks! And also, the titular creature is just a head of a T. rex and a body of an armored shark instead of an ichthyosaurid, that’s it.

I think folks are mostly focused on meg because sharks are still around. That and sharks are pretty neat.

Big Shark still cooler.

Ikr, I had a dinosaur encyclopedia and the size comparisons showed that they were bigger than megalodon

Lmfao probably because the big shark is the largest predator class to ever live, and sharks are more popular in general. Do you actually think a Megalodon wouldn’t THRASH an Icthyosaurid? It has the strongest bite ever measured at 48,000 psi, at largest it can be 3/4 the size of an arctic blue whale, and was partially related to one of the most feared sharks alive, the Great white🤷🏿‍♂️

Seriously! Why aren’t there any movies about the god damn 36-30 meter long Aust Cliff ichthyosaur?! Imagine if Jurassic World used Hector’s ichthyosaur and made the Mosasaurus normal sized. It would be like what happened with the original Jurassic Park where the size of Velociraptor/Deinonychus was exaggerated and a real animal of that size was discovered during production. And at least 200 year old eye witnesses as evidence would have been better than plain exaggerating the size of an animal by 15 times. Edit: I have came to the attention of “Dinoshark,” which is better than no ichthyosaur movies, but it definitely still stands that there should be more. Edit 2: I just started Dinoshark. They missed the biggest opportunity by making the ichthyosaur like 5 meters long. That’s like making the only movie where the main antagonist is a tyrannosaurid and using Moros instead of Tyrannosaurus or Tarbosaurus. Edit 3: Forget everything I just said, it’s a pliosaur. Why did someone in these comments mention this movie as if it was an ichthyosaur? Edit 4: Great movie. I’d recommend you watch it if you don’t know what to watch on movie night. Okay but where the hell are the ichthyosaur movies?! Please Hollywood I beg you, put Aust Colossus and Ichthyosaurus Pottsi in Meg 3: Prehistoric Plague! At least Mark Polonia! Someone send Mark Polonia a movie plot about Aust Colossus being awoken from the South Scotian Ridge and eating all the bikini girls at the beach. Mark Polonia can’t turn down 90 minutes of filler with bikini girls in the center of it! Edit 5: Fuck that ending. Doesn’t even have a good one liner.

Thank you so much! I'm on a very similar path (finishing my undergrad and looking into paleontology programs), and something I can't recommend enough is the Paleo Portal webinar program run by Brian Curtice. Brian brings in paleontologist guest speakers twice a month into zoom meetings to present research and network with the students. It's $10 a month, but it is absolutely worth it!

@@TheVividen Thank you so much for that recommendation!

​@@TheVividenIs it by this that you and your crew came across this future megapredator ?

@@francissemyon7971 Actually that was something that Apexzious discovered via his own contacts with researchers and private collectors. But Paleo Portal is a fantastic networking tool as well!

@@TheVividen Good to know and extremely intriguing. What could outclass in firepower an old female O. megalodon ? Latest upper estimate in the recent literature using summed crown width is a Chilean tooth in Shimada (2022) suggesting a 19.9-21.7 m fish with the corresponding killing apparatus...

Yea ive been looking and no info published. Hyped but Im loseing faith in this so called "hyperpredator". With that said can't wait hope it lives up to the hype.

@@carlsjoberg7110 Yeah… about that. Have you heard of the “yellowstone hyperpredator”? I believe it’s what he was referring to. It’s supposed to be this gargantuan toothed whale from the late Oligocene that is supposedly the largest macropredator by far. It’s obscure, and hasn’t been named yet, and was allegedly going to be described this month, but I doubt that’ll happen, so we’ll have to wait and see.

They'll be there!

Good catch. Yes, Triassic ichthyosaurs would likely not have done ramming nearly as much, but since it was more Late Triassic rather than a more basal form, I thought perhaps it may be slightly more applicable in this instance. I think the anguilliform swimming means they had better agility/turn radius than many animals. Livyatan as a marine mammal was endothermic with a high metabolism and O. megalodon had a body temperature intermediate to great whites/regional endotherms and true endotherms like modern cetaceans, so the difference in metabolism may not be so significant but definitely a boost for the ichthyosaurs when it comes to speed and activeness in general.

@@Apexzious Yeah, megalodon and Livyatan (obviously Livyatan) certainly had elevated metabolisms too, I just brought it up for Triassic ichthyosaurs just to make clear that they probably were on even footing with regionally endothermic sharks and cetaceans in activity. For what it's worth, Temnodontosaurus was more fish-like than the rest mentioned in this video, and Kyhytysuka (one of the last ichthyosaur genera, which happened to be macropredatory) certainly would've been too, so I think odontocete-like ramming, body slamming, and tail slapping was fully possible for them.

@@toothclaw6985 anguilliforms? probably not, shastasaurids alredy had rotund torsos and forked tails, so they had definetly alredy evolved more advanced methods of swimming like subcarangiform or carangiform

The first mistake was putting Megalodon and Livyatan in the same sentence as they aren’t similar by any means save for size. Megalodon on average was obviously much faster and more maneuverable than the sperm whale predecessor, though I’m not sure of the other animal since I’m commenting before watching the video. I’m just saying the Livyatan and Megalodon comparison is quite tiring as they didn’t even sit at the same levels in their respective food chains, seeing as Megalodon sat 2 whole trophic levels above it, and they solemnly ever actually competed for food to begin with. The shark ate much more, and much larger prey, as a hypervorous, cannibalistic shark that may or may not have snacked on its siblings before birth. The Icthyosuarid wouldn’t be holding a candle to the shark, and rest assured! Being that it was between 50-100 tons of pure muscle, teeth, and the strongest bite of anything to ever breath.

So what you’re saying is there’s actually evidence that this was more like a dolphin and that it couldn’t eat megs and the livyatons

@@wokencs330 Considering both of those animals lived tens of millions of years later, yeah, sure. The dolphin analogy os actually pretty close, if you compare the mandible of a modern day sperm whale to a large Ichtiosaur, you'll see many similarities.

Actually, of the hard-biting animals you mentioned, only tyrannosaurs (and big cats, which you didn’t mention) have adaptations for powerful bite at the front of the jaws; all the others have a much weaker bite at the front of the jaws than at the base of the jaws, even crocodilians. Canids in particular not only have a weaker bite at the front but also consistently have weaker jaws and teeth compared to similarly-sized pantherine cats (instead having more laterally compressed canines for slashing at prey). This doesn’t even get into the fact that you don’t necessarily need bite force to kill large prey efficiently, because bite force is only a small part of what makes a bite dangerous. Gape, sharpness of teeth, and forces produced by other parts of the predator’s anatomy (such as for force of it swimming into its prey, or in land animals the pushing and pulling forces behind the teeth generated by the neck) all play important roles as well. And did you literally ignore what the video pointed about many ichthyosaurs NOT having small conical teeth but much larger teeth specialized for macropredation, and with bladed edges in many cases? Or that some of them DIDN’T have long, narrow snouts? You’re now straight-up lying to argue that literally every ichthyosaur ever was only capable of eating animals much smaller than itself.

@@wokencs330 The other guy is wrong with some of his facts, don’t take him too seriously.

@@bkjeong4302 *AKCHUALLY!!!* I never said dogs, or bears, or even tyrannosaurs have identical bites at the base of their jaws as at the snout. That's nonsense, due to the leverages of the skull the front will always bite weaker. So maybe stop putting words in my mouth. Maybe if you actually read what I wrote, you're have seen that I specifically wrote "long snouted", because obviously it's worthless to compare a f_cking shonisaurus skull to a cat skull or mustelid skull in terms of biomechanics. What I WAS talking about, though, which you ignored, is ADAPTATIONS for strong bites. For instance - a slightly tilted jaw angle both in canids, bears, AND many carnivorous dinosaurs serves to bring the plane of biting BACK, closer to the masticator muscles. This, again, increases leverages in the front, as well as in the back. Ichtiosaurids typically have no such adaptation. On another note, the muscle attachment points on the skulls of mammal predators, as well as tyrannosauids, are as close to the snout as possible without sacrificing mobility - again, to increase bite force across the skull. Meanwhile the skull of ichtiosaurs is almost triangular, with muscle attachment points being in the very back of the skull. Then there's heterodontism. Both the aforementioned mammals, AND large bodies apex predator dinosaurs like tyrannosaurus, OR even crocodilians, show some level of heterodonty, with the front teeth in the skull being more adept at holding onto prey - longer, pointier, to penetrate deeply into the prey, and hold into it. Do you see this in ichtiosaurs? No. They had no such adaptation to hold onto prey - so they had their MASSIVE 1 inch teeth, coupled with their weak a__ bite force. That's not gonna hold a pliosaurus. "You don't need bite force to kill large prey efficiently" Well, you can always use bow and arrows, but I doubt ichtiosaurs had opposable thumbs. Here's the thing though. You can make the argument that ichtiosaurs hunted large prey WITH weak bite force - and of course, you'd have to find some evidence to back that up -, BUT THAT'S NOT WHAT THIS VIDEO PRESENTS. It talks about bite force specifically as evidence of "macropredatory" behaviour (disingenuously insinuating that the "macro" refers to the size of the PREY, when in fact it refers to the PREDATOR). So don't bring up other methods of predation to account for a weak bite force, unless you concede that ichtiosaurs had the bite force of a giant pair of grill tongs. As for the teeth... instead of listening to the video, maybe you can, you know... look at what those teeth actually looked like. I did. You didn't. Because I prefer evidence, you're just a "dino fan" who doesn't give two sh_ts about reality - you just want your 5 minutes of trivia to tell your mom. You're obviously a hostile little b_tch because your favourite fat scaly dolphins were insulted with the truth. Again, you don't even know what the f_ck macropredatory means. You just lapped up the slop thrown to you by the creator of this biased video. Maybe instead of trying to nitpick my arguments, just find a f_cking therapist, and tell them that meanies insulted your tub-a-lard lizard online. Because newsflash: ichtiosaurs were never EVER apex predators. And you can take that to the f_cking bank.

We have a lot of lakes, and really big marmots up in the mountains, but are an unlikely location to find super-sized ocean creatures

You can see parts of the specimens on display at the paleomuseum in Zurich ;). Feel free to visit :)

I’m going to watch walking with dinosaurs now

is the documentary following a single individual from birth to death cause that fucking destroyed me as a kid

@@dylanhurley7136 what documentary is that

no surprise really if you followed prehistoric news for years..its well known they could potentially get larger than the collected specimens as many experts hypothesized years ago....

24:15 Thalattoarchon cameo! They remembered it exists.

It's your lucky day! One was just described today! phys.org/news/2023-08-whale-filter-feeding-prehistoric-marine-reptile.amp

60 tons megaladon will reach 18 meters not 16 meters 16 meters megalodon will only have weight 50 tons

Like dolphins?

The one he mentioned in the video was based off of the T.rex Stan, which is a relativity small T.rex, which could explain the lower bite force.

@@AgroAcro Ah okay

amazing opinion i'm also picturing megalodon as a 1 foot long fish that just had one massive tooth that consisted of over 50% of it's body lenght

"It's crazy that the three largest marine predators are a fish, a reptile, and a Mammal." - no, the 3 largest are all mammals; blue whale, fin whale and sperm whale - and I'll save you your next reply and my response; yes, they are predators. They kill and consume other organisms, that's predation

@@Dr.Ian-Plect 100 ton megalodon specimen: *bonjour*

@@Ledinosour673 Irrelevant: *au revoir*

@@Dr.Ian-Plecthe means active predators, not filter feeders. don't be pedantic

@@imlivinginyourceiling I'm not interested in you stepping in for him. And excluding filter feeders isn't pedantic, it's a category of predation.

Yes, Berlin ichthyosaur state park. The largest known ichthyosaurs for a long time, until larger ones were described in the early 2000s. And yes, considerably larger than _Liopleurodon_ _Liopleurodon_ was about the size of a large great white shark or small orca, not in the same league as the largest ichthyosaurs or even many larger pliosaurs.

Lol true, Meg is one of "those" species, like the T- Rex and Argentinosaurus. It's like there's a curse preventing it from being surpassed.

The magic growing megalodon. I swear the shark gets bigger and bigger every year, lol!

Not really. The big ichthyosaurs quickly became outcompeted or died off. That happens a lot to large predatory animals, since they are most vulnerable to sudden climate change. When their prey becomes smaller or dies off, so do they. Ichthyosaurs held onto late into the cretaceous.

@@birbdad1842 except it wasn't just a sudden climate change, it was the END TRIASSIC MASS EXTINCTION

Indeed tomas this can be explained from the fact that when the icthyosaurs first appeared, the sea was still recovering from the worst mass extinction of all time, the great dying, therefore, they faced little to no competition and so easily managed to dominate, peaking at their very begginings The plesiosaurs originated in the late triassic, and so, they had to live in an ocean that was alredy crowded and were prey to the giant icthyosaurs like shoni and swiss tyrant When the End triassic mass extinction happened, a lot of icthyosaurs died out, barely re-estabilishing themselves as top predators, but then the toarcian extinction killed off those predatory icthyosaurs, allowing the plesiosaurs to finally take their place and dominate, spreading into a wide variety of shapes and sizes and becoming top predators themselves, wich is why they peaked in the early cretaceaous, with predatory forms like kronosaurus and sachicasaurus mosasaurs had the same story as plesiosaurs, they started out in a sea that was alredy crowded with plesiosaurs and small icthyosaurs, it was only when a series of sudden climate change killed off the icthyosaurs and pliosaurs that mosasaurs could take their place as new dominant predators, wich is why they peaked right at the end of their reign

It didn't have "robust teeth". The video said deep seated, which is true of all teeth. The size and shape of the teeth is consistent with other piscivorous animals. It ate fish. End of f_cking story. It ate fish like gharials do today.

That narrow bill like jaw means it could snap it shut quickly for taking fast prey

@@murunbuchstanzangur I.e. fish.

@horvathbenedek3596 yeah, or squid, or, you know,fast moving soft bodied prey

@@horvathbenedek3596 Sources still said it could take on large bodied prey and other marine reptiles by puncturing them.

Yes, at least some of them were able to. Larger eyes are needed for lower light conditions, so ichthyosaurs with proportionally larger eyes would be able to dive quite deep. Bony scutes would help to resist the high pressures at such depths.

The article should be getting released in less than an hour!

@@TheVividen I'm binge watching your videos right now while painting as I have just discovered your channel earlier. Amazing paleocontent man keep it up :) on your vocal chord vid😎

I am excited where can i find it.

The paper that will be published

@@user-pb1fu7rd6x It's paywalled, but you can rent the paper for 48 hours www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06381-1

It doesn't have an official name yet, so we're calling it the Swiss Tyrant for now. Martin Sander said it represented an unknown species, and it has yet to be fully described and named.

No, Hector’s is way, way larger (assuming the measurements are correct)

I'm excited for you to find out!

@@TheVividen 🙂🙂

It looked liked a basilosaurus

​@@user-pb1fu7rd6x That's another new upcoming predatory animal on August 2nd, 2023 published by paleontologists. Everyone will be talking about it, but there is something up our sleeves if you've seen the post credit scene in the vid.

@@user-pb1fu7rd6x basilosaurus isnt water lizard, and is not ichtyo

Almost certainly. The head shape is perfectly consistent with other animals that hunt fish, and the most readily available prey in an ocean are obviously fish. It makes very little sense to assume they could have hunted smaller ichtiosaurs or pliosaurs - ignoring the fact that the skull of even Shonisaurus isn't large enough to fit even a subadult Kronosaurus, for example, most piscivorous animals capitalize on the slender, hydrodynamic shape of fish to swallow them. Imagine a smaller ichtiosaur's fins getting stuck in the predator's mouth. Not a pretty end.