Some of our favorite animals used to be bigger.这giant beaverof the Pleistocene was the size of a black bear and theTitanoboa曾经是一个蛇longer than a school bus and as big around as a tractor tire.曾经有hippo-sized wombats, humongoussea scorpions, and birds of preythe size of small jets。
New research publishedin February 2020 in the journal Scientific Advances beefs up our picture ofStupendemys geographicus, a giant freshwater龟the size of a sensible four-door sedan, which lived in the coastal wetlands of South America between 5 and 10 million years ago, before the Amazon river was formed. The study found that the turtle was 100 times heavier than its closest modern relative, and had the largest carapace, or shell, of any turtle ever known.
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The whopping 2,524-pound (1,145-kilogram) goliath was also ready for battle. Some carapaces were tricked out with front-facing horns, sitting on both sides of their heads – something scientists haven't seen before in prehistoric turtles.
"The two shell types indicate that two sexes ofStupendemysexisted – males with horned shells, and females with hornless shells," said Marcelo Sánchez, director of thePaleontological Institute and Museumat the University of Zurich, in a新闻稿。
Their shells were also covered in big scars and puncture marks, suggesting a few things aboutStupendemys:These big brutes were fighters, the males and females looked different, and the males might even have fought each other for access to females. The horns could also have come in handy in fighting offPurussaurus, an unspeakably hefty caiman that weighed 9.25 tons (8.4 metric tons) and required 90 pounds (40.6 kilograms) of food a day just to get by.
虽然Stupendemys geographicuswas first described in the mid-1970s, this study has revised what we know about the size, anatomy, distribution and ecology of this turtle beast. Because the vast wetlands of prehistoric Venezuela and Colombia could support such a heavy-duty team of reptiles,Stupendemys和Purussaurusprobably duked it out until their ecosystem could no longer support them.
Let this be a lesson to us all.
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