Alligator Snapping Turtle
- Largest fresh-water turtle in North America
- Lives in rivers, canals, and lakes in Southeastern United States
- Can live to be 50 to 100 years old
- Males have been known to top 220 lbs
- Can submerge for 40 to 50 minutes before surfacing for air
- Uses a natural lure. Tongue is equipped with bright-red worm shaped piece of flesh which draws in curious prey
I do not own this image
Beastly and beautiful.
(photo by divemecressi)
Blue Ringed Octopus: The bite might be painless, but this octopus injects a neuromuscular paralysing venom. The venom contains some maculotoxin, a poison more violent than any found on land animals. The nerve conduction is blocked and neuromuscular paralysis is followed by death. The victim might be saved if artificial respiration starts before marked cyanosis and hypotension develops. The blue-ringed octopus is the size of a golf ball but its poison is powerful enough to kill an adult human in minutes. There’s no known antidote. The only treatment is hours of heart massage and artificial respiration until the poison has worked its way out of your system.
Meet Odobenocetops (literally “walrus-faced whale”). Yes, it’s a freak, but that’s why we love it. This genus of dolphin with its own family (Odobenocetopsidae) forms a sister group with Monodontidae, which houses both narwhals (Monodon monoceros) and beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas), which is part of what makes them so bizarre. Both Odobenocetops and the narwhal have tusks evolved from incisors, but the beluga whale does not. This means tusks would have evolved separately and independently in both. What’s more, is that the only male Odobenocetops found has profoundly uneven tusks. This is interesting because only one incisor normally becomes a tusk in narwhals, so these are two rare instances of asymmetry evolving convergently in related species, which only makes it more spectacular. Also astonishing is how different these dolphins were from their cousins. For one, they have flattened skulls and lacked the bulbous melons (which gives dolphins their rounded foreheads) of other toothed whales which are involved in echolocation. To compensate, their eyes are set comparatively high on the head and face forward, giving them binocular vision, kinda like us. These features suggest that it was likely a bottom feeder, evolving convergently with walruses (Odobenus rosmarus), and sucking small shelled invertebrates from the sea bed and prying them out with powerful tongues. Odobenocetops may have used its tusks to help dig up food, as walruses were once believed to.
Deinosuchus is an extinct genus related to the Alligator that lived 73 to 80 Ma (million years ago), during the late Cretaceous period. Though similar in appearance to modern day crocodilians, it measured up to 12 m (39 ft) in length and weighed up to 8.5 metric tons. Deinosuchus was probably capable of killing and eating large dinosaurs.
Modern American alligators have a maximum bite force of 9,452 newtons. Deinosuchus has been estimated to exceed a bite force of 18,000 newtons, possibly exceeding that of a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Knowledge of Deinosuchus remains incomplete, but better cranial material found in recent years has expanded scientific understanding of this massive predator.
I love imagining things of immense size like this… Looming over a horizon.
