Jurassic Porker: The Leedsichthys

It might be fair to say that the Leedsichthys holds a special place in paleontology's heart. Well, most gi-normous boney fish do. This particular gi-normous boney fish holds the nonexistent world record of "possibly the world's largest fish to ever exist". It's nonexistent because scientists like to spend too much time waffling and less time measuring. But to their credit a complete skeleton fossil has yet to be found, so it's a lot of guessing.

The Leedsichthys was an amazing species of fish that existed during the Jurassic. During the heyday of the dinosaurs incredible animals lived in the ocean. To complement this ridiculously large swimming buffet evolution created the Liopleurodon. This creature is arguably the largest predator to have ever existed. That's a post for another day.

Despite its epic size (estimated it could grow up to 25 M, or approximately 82 ft long - which, by the way, is twice as long as the current largest living fish) the Leedsichthys was a leisurely swimmer. Chances are its metabolism was super inefficient, aggravated by its diet which consisted only of shrimp, jellyfish, and plankton. This meant it had to conserve its energy. Like the modern Whale Shark (which is neither a whale nor a shark) it had giant rows of teeth-lined gills. Think of it like those cloth strips in automatic car washes. Despite its seemingly meager food preference, it easily outgrew every other species in the ocean. In fact, it probably took a whole team of predators to take down one adult Leedsichthys. It's been assumed it traveled in packs, after all in a time like the Jurassic...you can't underestimate the safety in numbers rule!

The etymology of "leedsichthys" is almost as fun as the actual animal. It's named after the British fossil enthusiast Alfred Leeds. The name is Greek for "Leeds's Fish". The species was then further cemented into curious fame by having "problematicus" tacked onto its name. And that's a true story. Apparently they had "problems" and/or difficulty imagining an animal of that scale could exist. Logistics aside, the Leedsichthys was truly a gentle giant. In fact, you could say it was near pansy status. The main difficulty in finding complete fossils is that the Leedsichthys had very fragile skeletons, despite it being considered obese by the prettier, thinner, faster fish.

So the next time your friend decides to tell you a tale about the fish that he caught that was "t - h - i - s big", just humor him.