Vicious-looking fellow, isn’t he? Those face bones would allow strong muscles to attach. I’m not expert enough to spot the tell-tale attachment points and estimate the bite strength, but others estimate it at over 1000 pounds of force. Apparently a lot of the prey was armored too. They could be about 20 feet (6m) long. Some varieties had bony plates all around the body, and some of them were 2 inches (6cm) thick.
But the thing that always seemed odd to me is the bones around the eye. Why? It isn’t as though you need huge strength to turn an eyeball in its socket.
On the principle that there’s a reason for the way things work, I assume that there’s some good reason for putting bones over part of your eyeball and pretty much all of your face.
If strength isn’t needed, it seems most likely to be for protection. The protection is pretty far-reaching, so the threat must have been extensive also.
- We’ve no evidence of anything larger in the sea with it—no bones, at any rate. That doesn’t mean there may not have been giant jellyfish or boneless tentacled beasts with a taste for fish, though how they might contrive to eat anything so large, even unprotected by bones, without at least a beak to gnaw with, is hard to design. A jellyfish couldn’t digest quickly enough to avoid being a target itself for scavengers. A keratin beak might disintegrate but still be fairly useful. So… maybe there was a boneless fish eater that had tough but non-bony gnawing parts and was big enough to be a threat to mid-sized Dunkleosteii.
- Maybe they ate each other too. There are scar marks on some Dunkelosteus fossil plates that match Dunkleosteus "teeth." That doesn’t quite explain the eyebones, though, unless they used fins or something to blind or distract each other. Which doesn’t seem very plausible given the way fish usually seem to fight.
- Maybe some of their prey objected to being eaten and lashed out with some kind of limbs or stingers. There’d be very good reason to armor up at least the head and eyes to avoid having chunks taken out by irate dinner prospects. We haven’t found such tentacles, but we very well might not. I like this option myself, not because it is obviously more likely but because it is more dramatic. Set the scene—a mollusky thing with an alien fur of tentacles around its opening is minding its own business when the water stirs and a fish appears trying to get a good grip to crush its shell. Mollusk goes into "full-flay" mode lashing with stingers to chase it off before it gets a good purchase.
- Maybe there were vicious parasites. I remember seeing a grim picture (National Geographic) of a whale’s eye with some small (1cm or so) feathery arthropods stuck in it, and being very grateful for having fingers. We’d not find any relics of such things, any more than we’re apt to find fossil mosquitoes (except in amber), so they might have been rare or ubiquitous.
- UPDATE: Or the bones of the face flexed so much when chomping through shells that the strain on the eye would have been painful unless it was buffered by connecting the eyes to a "floating" ring of bone. This would mean that appearances are deceiving and the eye was much smaller than it appeared.
That’s a fairly wide selection of options, with no obvious way to decide. And I can’t.
What brings up this meditation on possibilities is a set of the "Walking with" books Youngest Daughter brought home from the library. (Walking with Dinosaurs, Beasts, Cavemen, ...) The modeling is excellent, the settings very well done, the story arcs catch your interest, but speculation is too kind a term for the result.
They describe one of the species of "cavemen" as having no whites in the eyes, so they could not read each other’s emotions easily, so they did not have complex societies or interactions. (And they know this how, exactly?) That’s just the most egregious of the fantasies they indulge.
They pick the most dramatic possibilities (I have a liking for those myself, see above), but there’s no suggestion that this might be utter nonsense.
But of course it is BBC, and it looks realistic, so it has to be real, right?
2 comments:
Cavemen wore three-piece suits, but the cloth disintegrates, so we can't prove it.
Their women wore jedi robes at drum circles where they sang hymns to the moon. The men combed their back hair to the left if they were married and to the right otherwise.
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