#leedsichthys

The Paleo Party Guest of the day is Leedsichthys!

This is the largest ray finned fish of all time, and was initially mistaken as a Stegosaurian dinosaur! For this they earned their specific name L. problematicus.

Age: 165-148 mya

Location: Europe and South America

This sticker can be found in my Mesozoic Miscellany listing!

˚ Rippley ˚ has caught one of every fish in OPULENT quality!

--- Caught my last Radient and Opulent fish in Webfishing, and they were both Leedsichthys!! I really wanted to get myself commed catching one of them, and this drawing came out perfect!!

Art is my @cupozo

Happy Pride Month, Happy Jurassic June, and Happy World Ocean Day!

Leedsichthys is a giant member of the Pachycormidae, an extinct group of Mesozoic ray-finned fish that lived throughout the world’s oceans during the Callovian to Tithonian stages of the Middle Jurassic period some 165 to 148 million years ago. At upwards of 70ft (21m) in length and 100,000lbs (45,360kgs) Leedscithys is one of if not the largest ray-finned fish known to have ever existed. The first remains of Leedsichthys were identified in the nineteenth century. Especially important were the finds by the British collector Alfred Nicholson Leeds, after whom the genus was named "Leeds' fish" in 1889.  The type species is Leedsichthys problematicus. Leedsichthys fossils have been found in England, France, Germany and Chile. Like the largest fish today, the whale sharks and basking sharks, Leedsichthys problematicus derived its nutrition as a suspension feeder, using an array of specialized gill rakers lining its gill basket to extract zooplankton, small animals, from the water passing through its mouth and across its gills. It is less clear whether it also ate also phytoplankton and algae. Leedsichthys could have been a ram feeder, making the water pass through its gills by swimming, but could also have actively pumped the water through the gill basket. Leedsichthys itself would have been preyed upon by certain sharks, marine crocodiles like Metriorhynchus, and the pliosaurs such as Liopleurodon.

Art can be found at the following links

My 25 years of palaeoart chronology...