Sea monster beats T. rex

Monster bigger than T-rex found intact By Allan Hall and Mark Henderson of The Times 31dec02

A COMPLETE skeleton of the largest predator of all time, a Jurassic sea monster that made discovered in Mexico.

The fossilised bones, measuring 19m from nose to tail, have been identified as those of liopleurodon ferox, a fearsome carnivore that terrorised ocean life 150 million years ago.

The marine behemoth boasted teeth the size of machetes packed into 3m jaws powerful enough to bite through granite.

It weighed more than 50 tonnes - eight times heavier than tyrannosaurus rex - and hunted the ancestors of modern sharks and aquatic reptiles such as ichthyosaurs. It would have been capable of killing a blue whale, had the species lived at the same time.

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Typical Hun (Herald-Sun) - they forgot to capitalise the genus name... What *do* they teach journos these days? Oh. Sorry, silly question.

There was a nice pic in the sister paper of News Limited, The Australian. Check www.news.com.au to see if it's there.

That's certainly a gigantic animal, but hardly the first to outsize T-Rex - several dinosaurs and at least one crocodile share that distinction, as does the second largest predator in history, which approaches 17.5m in length and weighs an average of 40 tons - the sperm whale.

Philip Bowles

Is this the specimen (not species, I mean specimen) we've been hearing about ever since 'Walking with Dinosaurs'?

Nick Gardner

Regards bk

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I'd like to see the math or engineering behind this statement. I can bite through granite if it is thin enough, so what is the statement supposed to be telling us?

I don't know, I just took the statement for granite. I suppose that it really isn't written in stone, though...

The source on this thing seems to be into hypebole. They even called it a dinosaur and talked about it biting granite. I would like to know what the facts are.

Certainly, the icthyosaur that Betsy Nicholls of the Tyrrell dug up in British Columbia would give both a run for their money. The preliminary estimates I read (if I recall correctly) put it at about 18 metres and 30-60 tonnes at a guesstimate.

Of course the 8-year-old in me wonders which one would win in a fight. I have my $ on the Liopleurodon. But it would appear that one of them qualifies as 'largest predator of all time' in terms of body mass.