From a monster with four tusks to a newly discovered fearsome predator, here are ten
of the most bizarre fossils and extremely rare ancient species discovered.
10: The Four-Tusked Elephant In 2014, a French farmer in a town outside
Toulouse came across an extremely rare fossil!
It was very strange and large, like a monster with four tusks!
But the farmer didn't tell anyone about his discovery.
Perhaps he didn’t want the attention or fossil hunters overrunning his property!
Whatever the case, he kept the giant skull a secret but a few years later he had a change
of heart and decided to phone the Toulouse Natural History Museum and report it.
They came to check it out and were astounded at the significance of the skull.
The bones ended up belonging to an extinct relative of the elephant that roamed France
about 11 to 13 million years ago.
Known as Gomphotherium pyrenaicum, this strange creature had a pair of tusks coming out of
its lower jaw and two additional tusks coming out of its face like modern elephants.
The lower tusks were flat and probably used to dig for roots to eat.
The reason the history museum was so interested is that this species of ancient elephant is
not represented very well in the fossil record.
Previous to the skull being discovered, only a few teeth have been pulled out of the ground
in the last 150 years.
The farmer found the only complete skull of this type of elephant, which museum curator
Pierre Dalous referred to as practically mythical.
The next step for paleontologists is to extract the rest of the skeleton from the ground.
An immediate search in the area did not reveal any more fossils and it might just be that
this is one of a kind.
9: Godzilla Shark Scientists have finally named a 300-million-year-old
fossil that they had previously been referring to as a Godzilla shark.
The fossil was first discovered in New Mexico, and it's teeth were so unusual that paleontologists
realized they were looking at a very distinct species of animal.
The ancient teeth didn't quite look like the arrowhead teeth modern sharks have.
Instead, the teeth were squat and short, probably used for grasping and crushing prey instead
of stabbing.
This is according to John-Paul Hodnett, the graduate student who first unearthed the fossil
in Albuquerque back in 2013.
All these years later, the shark has finally been officially designated as a new species.
The Godzilla shark has been named Dracopristis hoffmanorum, which translates roughly to “Hoffman’s
Dragon Shark.”
The name was chosen in honor of the family who owns the land in which the fossils were
discovered.
According to Hodnett, the area is rich with fossils and exceptionally easy to access because
of a lot of commercial digging operations going on in the region.
It actually took them seven years of excavation before they could name the shark.
They had to very carefully remove the layers of sediment from the 12 rows of teeth on the
lower jaw of the shark.
And that was only one of the tough jobs that took them nearly a decade to complete.
As for the shark, it split from modern sharks and rays about 390 million years ago.
These types of beasts went extinct about 330 million years ago, back when New Mexico was
under the ocean.
8: Giant Cloud Rats Giant rats don’t sound good.
But while you might be picturing creepy rats living in the sewers and lurking around your
home, giant cloud rats are actually cuddly.
Native to the Philippines, these giant rats are more like squirrels, living in the trees,
high up in misty mountain forests.
But according to new fossil evidence, it turns out that these giant cloud rats have been
living in the Philippines for much longer than previously thought.
Scientists recently discovered the fossilized remains of three previously unknown species
of giant cloud rats that once lived with our own ancient human ancestors.
According to Larry Heany at Chicago's Field Museum, the Philippines has the greatest concentration
of unique mammal species anywhere in the world.
Most of these animals are small and less than half a pound, and most of them live in the
tropical forest.
The recent extinct fossil species have revealed a biodiversity that was once even greater
than it is today.
The cloud rats that once lived in the trees of the Philippines were giants compared to
the cloud rats of today.
They weighed over two pounds and would have been more like fat tree koalas.
They may have been so large that the ancient indigenous people of the Philippines hunted
them all the way to extinction.
This would explain why they disappeared abruptly several thousand years ago.
7: Ancient Hedgehog Fossil hunters in Germany have now discovered
an ancient hedgehog!
This isn't the most monstrous creature ever discovered by paleontologists, but it is exceptionally
unique.
Experts were excavating a pit of oil shale that had once been a lake formed out of a
volcanic crater when they made the discovery.
This crater has actually been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site because of all
the fossils found within it that date back between 57 and 36 million years ago, a time
when the Earth's mammals were developing at a blistering rate.
The ancient hedgehog looked a bit different than how you might expect.
It's true that the animal is definitely related to modern hedgehogs.
So far, paleontologists have only found seven prehistoric hedgehog fossils, making it rarer
than most dinosaurs.
Dr. Norbert Micklich from the Hessen State Museum, a man who himself has an impressive
collection of fossils discovered from the volcanic crater, told local news sources that
the find was extraordinary.
Researchers were even able to identify the shape of the animal’s hairs thanks to fossilized
bacteria left on the skeleton.
The hedgehog was in such great condition that scientists will be able to take samples from
inside the gut and see what the hedgehog ate for its last meal.
6: Tyrannosaur Pack Animals A new discovery by paleontologists has revealed
some shocking information.
It turns out that one of the most feared dinosaurs in the history of dinosaurs may not have been
a solitary predator.
I'm of course talking about the fearsome tyrannosaur.
New fossil evidence has revealed that the tyrannosaur probably operated as a social
carnivore like a modern wolf.
They hunted in packs and were probably smarter than we think!
Paleontologists came up with the theory while excavating a mass tyrannosaur death site that
they found in southern Utah at the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
Using Geochemical analysis of the fossilized bone and rock, specialists from the University
of Arkansas determined that the tyrannosaurs died in the exact same place and around the
exact same time, suggesting an ancient society of tyrannosaurs working together!
But what's really fascinating is that according to ABC News, this is the third mass tyrannosaur
grave site that has been discovered so far in North America.
More research still needs to be done to confirm whether tyrannosaurs were really pack animals
or not, but it's looking pretty good for the hypothesis.
Some say the tyrannosaurs definitely traveled together in rudimentary social groups, while
others say they only came together when times got tough, using their combined strength to
capture dwindling prey.
What do you think?
Let me know in the comments below!
5: The Giant Turtle Fossils belonging to turtles that were bigger
than cars have recently been found in South America.
These turtles lived between 13 million and 7 million years ago, roaming throughout what
is today Colombia and Venezuela.
The fossils were discovered in both the Tatacoa Desert and the Urumaco region of Venezuela.
According to the BBC, each turtle was the same weight and width of your average sedan!
They lived in a massive wetland that stretched across South America before the Amazon River
was ever created.
But what did these giant turtles look like?
Males had horns sticking out of their shells that were probably used like spears for fighting.
The giant turtle likely lived at the very bottom of huge lakes and rivers, alongside
some of the biggest crocodiles to ever live on the planet.
But unlike the crocodiles, these giant turtles only ate little animals, loose vegetation,
whatever fruit was available, and of course seeds.
These turtles needed their immense size to fend off predators.
The only way to fight a giant crocodile bigger than a car was to grow a shell just as big.
Several of these turtle fossils were even found with giant crocodile teeth embedded
inside of them.
4: The Sea Monster The fossils of a very unusual sea monster
have been puzzling paleontologists for over 100 years.
The fossils are that of the Tanystropheus, something that resembles the Loch Ness Monster
mixed with a prehistoric crocodile and crossed with an underwater giraffe.
It was first described back in 1852 and was reconstructed 120 years later in 1973.
Paleontologists know that the sea monster once lived in what is today Switzerland, only
242 million years ago during the Middle Triassic Period.
The creature was roughly 20 feet long, with half its length made up of its ridiculously
long neck.
What scientists couldn’t figure out is just why in the world this animal existed in the
first place.
What could a marine predator have needed such a long neck for?
For that matter, scientists haven't been able to figure out if the animals even lived on
land or in the water.
It wasn't until recently that scientists used CT scanning technology to reconstruct crushed
skulls dug out of the dirt.
The results have proved once and for all that the sea monsters dwelled in the water and
that they were indeed ambush predators.
The Tanystropheus probably used its long and slender neck to slither up to their prey undetected,
kind of like a sneaky water snake.
3: The Jurassic Pokémon Scientists have found the amazing fossils
of a brand-new species of pterosaur and they say it looks like a Pokémon.
These fossils were found in northern China and they date back to the Jurassic Period.
The pterosaur lived for a very long time in Earth’s history, being some of the largest
winged creatures on our planet from 252 to 66 million years ago.
There were many different kinds of pterosaurs, ranging from as large as a sparrow to as huge
as a giraffe.
Pterosaurs were basically dinosaurs with wings.
They even went extinct at the same time that the dinosaurs did.
This newest species comes from 160 million years ago.
It’s been given the name Sinomacrops bondei.
Fion Waisum Ma from the University of Birmingham worked extensively on the discovery.
Ma told Vice World News that scientists examined the fossil using CT scans to study at least
100 anatomical characteristics before they could officially label it a new species.
They say the creature was the size of a pigeon and had a mouth like a frog.
It also had large eyes and huge wings with thick membranes.
And as for its resemblance to a Pokémon, some people are saying that the pigeon-sized
pterosaur looks kind of like a real-life Zubat, or maybe a Zubat mixed with a Pidgey!
2: The Oldest Octopus Scientists from Heidelberg University in Germany
may have just discovered the oldest known octopus in the world at an ancient dig site
in Newfoundland, Canada.
According to CTV News, researchers are saying the animal was probably the oldest ancestor
of both squids and octopuses, making it the original cephalopod!
Cone-shaped shells were found near Conception Bay.
These fossils date back 522 million years.
That's approximately thirty million years older than the first known cephalopod.
This includes all classifications of squids, cuttlefish, and octopuses.
What's truly fascinating is that experts have suspected for a long time that octopuses evolved
much earlier from complex organisms.
Until now, they never had any proof.
But with these newest cephalopod fossils, experts can safely say that cephalopods originated
at the beginning of everything, back when multicellular organisms first began to evolve
during what is known as the Cambrian explosion.
This was when life on the planet truly began to take shape, and it is fascinating to learn
that cephalopods were at the forefront of this evolution – and it’s even more amazing
to think that over half a billion years later, these creatures are still among some of the
smartest, most unique, and most highly advanced lifeforms on the planet.
1: The One Who Causes Fear A new and horrifying dinosaur has just been
discovered in Argentina.
It was a meat-eating predator that struck fear into the hearts of all the other dinosaurs.
This is why scientists have named the creature “one who causes fear.”
Translated to the native Mapuche language, it’s named Llukalkan aliocranianus.
It was probably the top predator in Patagonia during the Late Cretaceous Period because
of its massive size, its destructive bite force, its razor-sharp teeth, its fearsome
claws, and its remarkable sense of smell.
This dinosaur stood about 30 feet tall and prowled the southern subcontinent of Gondwana
while the tyrannosaurs ruled to the north.
But these southern predators were a bit different from their northern friends.
They had short and stubby arms like the T. rex, but they also had abnormally short skulls
that were often covered in bumps and horns.
Scientists also discovered special ear cavities inside of the fossilized skulls, suggesting
that they had far superior hearing to other predatory dinosaurs of the time.
Unfortunately for the one who causes fear, it's time ran out just as it began to flourish.
The fossil evidence suggests the dinosaur had been gaining sophisticated traits, meaning
it was still moving down an evolutionary pathway to becoming an apex animal.
Then that pesky rock smashed into the Earth and it was game over.
Thanks for watching!
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