Searching for the King of the Sea Monsters

Kids are great. Mostly. Well...mine are great.

I've found that since I stopped being a dick, my relationship with my boy has blossomed. He's no longer a dick; he's nicer to his sister; I don't have to yell at him anymore...it's amazing how powerful adjusting my own attitude has been.

Maybe I'm being too hard on myself.

In any case, the other day we were checking out a cool dinosaur-and-other-prehistoric-beast book (that uses a spindly sans-serif fonts for blocks of text they occasionally print over photos of OCEAN SURFACE) and we came across a picture of dunkleosteus:

Coming into its position as apex predator nearly 350 million years ago during the Devonian Period, this placoderm---er, armored fish and an early jawed critter---swam around taking bites out of whatever it felt like, even fellow dunkleosteus. It didn't have teeth, rather that bony-jaw-armor was actually sharp bitey-bone, and its jaw would snap shut like a paper cutter so fast the biteforce was nearly the same the T-rex. At 30 feet long (!!), this thing only feared other specimens of it's own species, and a proliferation of harmful algal blooms that would eventually choke off its oxygen supply and hasten its extinction.

In an odd twist, as a lobe-finned fish, the descendants of its tetrapod cousins would become us, and not the ray-finned fish that are the vast majority of fish in today's oceans.

My son was immediately obsessed with this sea monster. It had to be the coolest, toughest, and BEST sea monster ever. NOTHING could ever challenge its primacy as far as sea monsters are concerned.

Well, I challenged him, what about the mosasaur we watched the program about a while back? That was a pretty badass sea monster, too, right? A glint in his eye: recognition. The mosasaur...he said, his voice trailing as he tried to imagine the two meeting.

A few pages later in the very same book we found the spread about the mosasaur. It grew to it's status as apex predator and all-around badasss sea monster about 300 million years later, around 50 million years ago, after the non-avian dinosaurs had all vanished. The largest of which ticked the measuring stick around 50 feet (!!), meaning it was even bigger than dunkleosteus.

This bothered my son, as he clung to his feelings that dunkleosteus had to be the best. I mean, he doesn't even have teeth, rather sharp bone-blades that she snaps down as hard as T-rex, man! Also, I think he loved saying dunkleosteus, which is amusing, because he liked saying mosasaur also.

We concluded the mosasaur portion of the search with, "Well, it may have come down to whomever got the first bite it, because ol' dunkster could probably do plenty of damage with that chomper." 

This was satisfying until I reminded him an even older obsession of his in these matters: megalodon:

No glint in his eye this time, rather a full-on sparkle. Megalodon! That would show that mosasaur! A proper fish and all, megalodon roamed the seas around 25 million years ago, after the mosasaurs disappeared, and long after the end of the Devonian.

Clocking in at 65 feet long it was truly enormous. Would dunkleosteus just be a meal for this giant predator?

I tried to explain that this wasn't really a competition, since the disparate eras in which these beasts existed, and that it was okay to revere all of them. And that we should be excited that such cool monsters ever existed at all, and that we know about them.

AND, oddly enough, with dunkleosteus and mosasaur being nearly certain and mostly guessed for megalodon: it looks like all three gave live birth.

After this talk and realization, the day's activities went to his Hot Wheels experiments and which cars went however far through his rubber band-powered loop-de-loop.

I'll save xiphactinus and liopleurodon for next time. Turns out we watch our share (and many others, it sounds like) of ancient oceans and ancient earth science shows on Curiosity Stream.

That I can name five ancient sea monsters off the top of my head, along with basic facts like size and appearance (dunkleosteus, xiphactinus, mosasaur, liopleurodon, and megalodon) but couldn't tell you all of the Kardashian siblings names probably tells you how my screen time is spent...