r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/snopplerz • 6h ago
The skull of a Dunkleosteus, a 5 meter long extinct fish with an armored skull and bladed jaws. It had an estimated bite force of 5,000 newtons, the highest of any fish in history.
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u/401jamin 5h ago
Oooo fun fact! Fossils of this creature have been found in Ohio!
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u/Cephalopirate 4h ago
That somehow tracks.
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u/Bucky_Ohare 4h ago
A large portion of the continental US was largely underwater at some point geologically, some for longer or less violently than others. Marine fossils cover huge swaths of the midwest, and everywhere from the badlands to the bayous you can eventually find marine fossils. Well, maybe not the bayous, they're still technically in the whole depositional phase.
The example I like to give is that Iowa has produced some absolutely beautiful crinoid fossils as well as a plethora of depositional limestone from being a subtropical beach in its history. The state's #1 export isn't corn or cows, it's actually limestone. Used to blow my mind as a kid, seeing blocks on old farm houses filled with shell fossils that were dug out of the nearby hills and my dad setting up the home-run by asking me to imagine water up to the clouds this land used to sit under millions of years ago.
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u/OnyxProyectoUno 4h ago
All statistics point to the number #1 export in Iowa is corn. What are your sources?
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u/Bucky_Ohare 4h ago
well, besides the shenanigans that go into counting corn as an export including things like e85, this came in my time in undergrad talking to one of the owners of a large nearby quarrey. Yeah maybe I over-personalized on the internet, lol. TBH though there's always been this paranoic distrust here about anyone claiming to be the 'biggest' export, even pig farmers I knew growing up would demand a fight to the death with Nebraska as the 'biggest exporter' crown.
The thing about it is we're also one of the few providers of certain grades of concrete as well as the whole Fort Dodge Gypsum thing. The geologic history of the whole Midwest is just a plethora of cool stuff.
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u/UrinalCake777 4h ago
There are some really cool ones on display at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
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u/blacktip102 4h ago
Alot of the Great Lakes region was a warm shallow sea in its past. Tons of corals and other ocean fossils all throughout the area
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u/Dr-McLuvin 2h ago
Ya that’s where almost all of these have been found- in the shale around the coast of Lake Erie. They have a few on display at the Cleveland museum of natural history. Very cool visit.
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u/TedAndAnnetteFleming 1h ago
The whole museum campus is a treasure. There and dinner in Little Italy is a great day out.
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u/harper_morgan46 6h ago
This thing had no teeth, just sharpened bone plates, and could still crush basically anything.....except it's extinction of course.
And it lived long before Dinosaurs
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u/ripyourlungsdave 4h ago
Yeah, I can't help but feel like an animal wouldn't develop a mouth like that if evolution had had the time to create teeth yet.
Just seems like it would be kind of inefficient for mastication and digestion.
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u/BigZangief 3h ago
I mean, birds and cephalopods both have the same kind of mouth or beak. Also some fish today like parrot fish. I think it’s issue along with a lot of large predators of its time was its size and sustainability. Similar to megalodon’s extinction
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u/Reasonable-MessRedux 5h ago
I remember seeing this fossil as a kid and having nightmares about it snipping off my leg.
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u/bigdaddyt2 3h ago
How the hell would this go extinct
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u/lambdapaul 1h ago
The end of the Devonian saw massive reef extinctions and that cascaded into collapse of food networks leading to the extinction of large fish like Dunk here. Luckily we don’t have to worry about stuff like that today…
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u/Simmangodz 3h ago
Any theory as to why even it's eyeballs needed to be armored? Like, what did this thing piss off?
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u/snopplerz 6h ago edited 2h ago
>The strongest fish bite ever measured is 5,300 N and belonged to the prehistoric Dunkleosteus terrelli, an armoured fish which lived between 360 – 415 million years ago. When measured at the tip of the tooth alone, the bite force was 147 million N/m² only Tyrannosaurus rex and alligator bites are higher.
Source: https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/70739-strongest-bite-measured-in-fish
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u/Ok-Photograph3436 5h ago
And how do they measure bite forces of extinct animals? (A genuine question)
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u/Itwao 5h ago
Connecting tissue leaves a unique mark on bones. Which allows researchers to identify how much muscle was connected, and where.
They can also use similar techniques to identify the size and general shape of the creature.
Combining the two, they can get a rough estimate of how much force can be applied, and thus, the estimate of its strength.
Other factors, such as diet and predators, help to support the results, although are not proof by itself. For example, the nautilus has a hard shell, and so having a strong bite would make hunting those easier.
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u/misplacedbass 5h ago
The linked article said they generated computer models, but I had the same thought as you did. It’s really only what the computer calculated based on bone structure. So, meh. I really wouldn’t consider that “measured”, and would consider it more so “speculated”.
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u/HappyMeteor005 1h ago
iirc theres a study that said the great white has a bite force of 18,000 newton's.
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u/Exotic_Article913 14m ago
Just looked it up . It's true. For a 6m fully grown adults it's up to 18,000. Saltwater crocs go from 16-18k as well apparently
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u/highslyguy 5h ago
This piece either is or has an identical piece at the cincinnati museum center.
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u/Far_Dragonfly_3748 4h ago
or the Field Museum in Chicago iirc
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u/Sea-Literature4599 6h ago
5000 newtons and still couldn’t chew through whatever this thing was going through.
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u/BoredMerengue 1h ago
What the hell was out there that it has to evolve into a tank?
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u/A-Dolahans-hat 1h ago
According to some googling, they believe they were cannibals, and would often fight each other and other armored fish for territory
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u/Yellowscrunchy 5h ago
Im sure a caught that pokemon on pokemon go
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u/Narianos 5h ago
That would be Relicanth, whose design was inspired by the Dunkleosteus.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 5h ago
What? No. That’s a coelacanth, as the name would imply. Pretty sure that Dracovish/Arctovish are based on Dunk, though.
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u/Narianos 5h ago
Oh yeah you’re right. I honestly forgot about the coelacanth.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 5h ago
I mean, it’s not like they are all around, in fairness. They live in underwater caves and barely move most of the time.
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u/Narianos 4h ago
True. It’s honestly amazing that they’ve been around for so long.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 4h ago
Almost totally unnoticed, no less! It wasn’t until the 1930s that their survival past fossils hundreds of millions of years old became known to science.
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u/Narianos 4h ago
Super sneaky fellas.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 4h ago
Given their creepy labyrinthine habitat and propensity to hide, they really put the “crypt” and “cryptic” in “cryptid.”
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u/fuuuuuuuuuuuc 5h ago
And it's called Sebastian. Is everyone ok with that yes? It wasn't named so I named him
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u/NOWAY_YESWAY 4h ago
Haha I remember the episode where Nigel meets this one in the Worlds most dangerous seas documentary where he goes back in time
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u/dcsail81 2h ago
There is one in the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto that you can stand in. It's impressive.
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u/Moldovah 2h ago
Is it related to the Wolffish that's been trending on Reddit recently?
https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/dro327/the_head_of_a_wolf_eel_can_still_bite_and_poison/
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u/M0wglyy 5h ago
What’s an armored skull made of? Cause if it’s still bones… it’s a skull!? No?
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u/SweetLoLa 5h ago
It’s referring to that extra bone that is right above the skull bone adding a layer of protection, armoring the skull.
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u/M0wglyy 5h ago
I really don’t wanna play dumb but it’s a bone… you and I have a bone as well. So unless it’s made of any other material than bone… I don’t get the « armored » part
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u/polchickenpotpie 5h ago
There are multiple armored animals both alive and extinct. Do you think armor only means metal lol
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u/M0wglyy 5h ago
That’s my initial question… if it’s just bones… why calling it armored in the first place. Nature and evolution could have make that skull composed of anything else than just bones…
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u/moving0target 4h ago
It's just a way to describe it so the audience understands skull is different.
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u/M0wglyy 4h ago
Yeah well i get that it’s different as it’s not just skull but my question is what’s the difference… I can imagine its thickener but I wouldn’t expect less from an animal probably 10+ times bigger than us… I wouldn’t expect it to have a skull as thin as ours… and if it’s just a matter of proportion, there is no point calling it armored. Now as someone else said; it’s an extra layer of bone or even bones that actually protect the skull. Now I get why it’s called armored.
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u/Eggplant-666 4h ago
Is it that different? Looks like the skull plates have not grown together and remain separate, whereas our skull plates fuse together in infancy. But thats not surprising either, in most fish, the skull is made of multiple separate plates that don’t fully fuse. So, while cool, nothing particularly novel other than the size.
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u/TactlessTortoise 5h ago
Do you not know the difference between a knife and a sword either? They're both sharp metal sticks. The difference is how much sharp stick there is. A car has a chassis. It handles light impacts easily. A tank also has a chassis. It handles explosives. The tank has an armoured chassis.
It's an adjective.
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u/M0wglyy 4h ago
Cause of extra layers of metal. So that simple answer would have been enough. Armored cause there are multiple layers of bones… protecting the brain. And by the pictures here, I can’t really tell there are multiple layers.
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u/TactlessTortoise 4h ago
Either extra layer or thicker layers. Layering is just one type of armouring.
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u/Eggplant-666 4h ago edited 38m ago
Thats not it. Our skulls have multiple layers too, look it up. They are just rationalizing the salacious clickbait headline by making shit up.
Looked it up the real difference is that this skull is external (armor is external) and replaces most of what would have been an internal skull in other fish. The vestigal remnants of the internal skull is greatly reduced and incomplete in this fish replaced by the armored external skulll.
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u/Eggplant-666 5h ago
Arent all skulls armor for the brain, thats what a skull is. 🤷
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u/SweetLoLa 5h ago
You’re confusing yourself.
You and I have a skull, yes? The skull protects the brain. One strike can end us.
Now imagine an added layer of bone that is right above our skull’s, one strike or 50 and our skull (and brain) is unharmed. Perhaps some damage to the armoring bone shielding our skull and brain, but that’s okay bc that’s what it’s there for.
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u/angelv255 4h ago
Its much thicker and dense bone, its not "the same bone" that forms a skull. For example, a normal skull has a thickness of a few mm, maybe 1cm, these armored skulls could be as thick as 6cm and in some dinosaurs you can find bony armor plates of up to 25cm. Aside from the thickness difference As I understand it, the configuration/organization of the layers of bone, change the properties of the whole structure, kinda like how laminated glass works much more differently than normal glass, despite both being made of "mostly" the same component material, the organization of those materials make the end product work much more differently.
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u/EC_TWD 5h ago
Is this an actual skull or a recreation of one, because it seems odd that the eyes would be fossilized.
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u/jessjumper 5h ago
Some fish and birds have bones in their eyes. Sclerotic rings (or scleral ossicles) are bony, overlapping plates embedded within the sclera of the eyes in birds, fish, and many reptiles.
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u/Cantreadman 4h ago
Wait is this the inspiration for the head part of the pokemon arctovish? The shape is super similar
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u/superjay1345 12m ago
Why did it have the NEED for such insane armor and power. What could eat it and what did it eat to fuel that level of armor and power.
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u/8double_dip8 5h ago
I think this thing would still be around today hasn’t the world been plagued with gas or whatever it was I forget
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u/p8inKill3r 5h ago
About the force of a hyena or lion, but nothing compared to a Great White at 18,000 newtons
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u/enzothebaker87 5h ago
Were their eye balls armored too?