- [Narrator] The world is full of strange creatures,
and the ancient past offers up stranger ones still.
Vastly different environments created these species
and it's very likely that these prehistoric creatures
are so exotic, the environment of today's world
couldn't even support them.
These are five of the strangest prehistoric creatures
that ever lived.
Take, for example, Helicoprion, a shark-like creature
with no idea of how its teeth are supposed to work.
Generally, animals have two sets of teeth:
one upper and one lower, extending from left to right.
Helicoprion, however,
had a single row of teeth oriented from front to back,
so that it was something like a razor-like tongue.
There've been tons of guesses over the last century
as to what Helicoprion looked like.
Made of cartilage,
its entire body structure decays over time,
leaving no fossilized remains except for its teeth.
We have several examples of tooth-whorls
left behind by the species,
but little reference as to where it belonged
on the Helicoprion.
More recent studies indicate that the whorl was coiled
inside of the mouth and was used to slice up food
as the creature opened and closed its mouth.
The creature might have been 40 feet in length
with the whorl carrying 140 teeth.
But at the end of the day,
all this is merely speculation.
Start with an elephant, shorten the tusks,
flatten the snout.
Now elongate the lower jaw several feet,
making it wider in the front than in the back.
While you're at it, add two large flat teeth
to that lower jaw,
pointing them outward rather than upward.
That's a Platybelodon,
and it's a pretty darn absurd-looking creature.
Conventional wisdom has it that this creature lived
in swampy areas, where it scooped up muck
with its unusually large lower jaw
and let the food slide backward into its mouth.
More recently, however,
scientists came up with an even more bizarre image
of its eating habits.
It's now been suggested
that Platybelodons wrapped their tusks around trees
and rubbed their teeth against branches,
breaking them free to be eaten.
Almost nine feet long,
the Jaekelopterus is the largest known arthropod
in the history of planet Earth.
Arthropods are invertebrate creatures with exoskeletons,
including insects, spiders, and crustaceans.
Known as sea scorpions, Jaekelopterus lived in the water,
but not in salt water as the name implies.
It would have been found in lakes and rivers,
presuming there was some reason
you wanted to find this monstrosity.
At least it couldn't come onto the land.
While it did have legs,
they were too spindly to support it
without the buoyancy of water.
Giant claws on folding arms
could strike out and catch prey,
then draw it back to its mouth.
These arms and claws, on their own,
add another three feet to Jaekelopterus's length.
Jaekelopterus lived 400 million years ago,
when there were few jawed vertebrates like fish
to provide competition.
Once evolution brought these creatures onto the scene,
giant invertebrates had to reduce in size
to compete in the new environment.
Elasmosaurus was a 46-foot long, two-ton water creature
who shared the Earth with the dinosaurs.
Edward Drinker Cope
first described the Elasmosaurus in 1868,
depicting it as a short-necked, long-tailed creature.
Cope was an expert on lizards,
and he expected Elasmosaurus as having similar proportions
to modern lizards.
Legend has it that it was academic rival
Othneil Charles March who corrected Cope,
insisting the head belonged on the longer segment,
not the shorter one.
The result was a creature with four flippers,
a short tail, and a ridiculously long neck.
To give a sense of proportion,
the tail contained 18 vertebrae,
while the neck contained 72.
This made the neck more than 20 feet long,
longer than the total height of today's tallest giraffe.
Cope and March went on to compete in what's known today
as the Bone Wars.
Together they discovered over 100 prehistoric species,
but they did so while sabotaging each other's dig sites,
stealing each other's artifacts,
hiring men to infiltrate the other's teams,
publicly bad-mouthing one another, and more.
Speaking of giraffes,
have you ever considered what would happen
if one could fly?
Because Quetzalcoatlus is, in size,
essentially a flying a giraffe.
On the ground, it stood about 18 feet tall,
with a long neck and elongated beak.
When flying, it had a 36-foot wingspan.
And most recent estimates guess it weighed about 500 pounds.
There's been debate on how a creature that big
could ever have achieved self-powered flight,
and it also appears
Quetzalcoatlus was adept at moving on the ground,
using its wings as front legs.
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and thanks for watching, and thanks for learning.
(electronic music)