Giant Human Eating Fish

An ancient voracious fossil of a fish species that preyed on our ancestors 360 million years ago has been discovered in South Africa by researchers. The ancient southern supercontinent Gondwana was home to a gigantic fish with deadly fangs 350 million years ago, long before dinosaurs roamed the earth.

This huge creature measuring up to 9 feet, is the largest bony fish to be recorded from the Late Devonian (383 million to 359 million years ago) and was classified as a predatory fish. Scientists gave it the name of Hyneria udlezinye, or the “one who takes in others,” in a native language “IsiXhosa”, where the fossil was discovered.

“Picture a huge predatory fish, easily topping 2 meters [6.5 feet] in length and looking somewhat like a modern alligator gar but with a shorter face like the front end of a torpedo,” study co-author Per Ahlberg (opens in new tab), a professor in the Department of Organismal Biology at Uppsala University in Sweden, told Live Science. “The mouth contained rows of small teeth, but also pairs of large fangs which could probably reach 5 centimeters [2 inches] in the largest individuals.”

It was in 1995 that researchers discovered the first clues to the ancient fish’s existence when they discovered fossilized scales near Makhanda (formerly known as Grahamstown) at an excavation site called Waterloo Farm. Researchers have finally been able to put together the skeleton of a new giant tristichopterid, an ancient bony fish, in a study published Wednesday (Feb. 22) in the journal PLOS One(opens in new tab).

Study co-author Robert Gess, a paleontologist at Albany Museum and Rhodes University in South Africa said, “it’s been a long road to figuring out where these scales came from.”

Its skeleton suggests that H. Udlezinye was a fearless predator. “The fins are mainly towards the back of the body. This is an ecological characteristic of a lie-in-wait predator; it can put on a sudden spurt. Hyneria would have lurked in the dark shadows and waited for passing things,” Gess said. “It was the one that consumed others.”

According to Ahlberg, the giant fish probably preyed on tetrapods, the ancestral group that gave rise to humans.The tristichopterids evolved into monsters that, in all likelihood, ate [our ancestors],”

The fossils from Waterloo Farm are the first to indicate that Hyneria lived in Gondwana, as well as that giant Tristichopterids lived across the continent and even at the poles.

The majority of Tristichopterid fossils found to date have come from Australia, which skews our understanding of their distribution.

At the end of the Devonian, approximately 359 million years ago, tristichopterids were extinct as a mass extinction event. A common ancestor with our ancestral lineage existed earlier in the Devonian, but they do not have direct descendants today. Ahlberg said that late Devonian tristichopterids were more like our second cousins than our direct ancestors.

Sources: Livescience