Documentary, National Geographic Top 10 Biggest Beasts Ever
National Geographic Top 10 Biggest Beasts
National Geographic's "Top 10 Biggest Beasts Ever" is a documentary special that explores the largest animals of their kind to have ever roamed the planet, focusing on prehistoric giants before human dominance. The program uses advanced CGI to visualize these colossal creatures, including birds with wingspans rivaling airplanes and dinosaurs comparable in size to a Boeing 737, bringing their lives vividly back to life through dramatic size comparisons and scientific analysis.
The documentary was originally aired in 2015 and features experts uncovering the latest discoveries and adaptations that allowed these supersized species to thrive.
Saltwater Crocodile: The largest living reptile, with a maximum recorded mass of 2,000 kg (4,409 lbs) and a length up to 7 meters.
Blue Whale: The largest animal ever known to have existed, averaging 30 meters in length and weighing up to 200 tons.
African Elephant: The largest land animal, with males reaching up to 4 meters in height and weighing up to 6 tons.
Giraffe: The tallest land animal, with an average height of 4.7 meters.
Ostrich: The largest bird by weight, reaching heights of 2-3 meters.
Polar Bear: The largest carnivorous bear, with adult males weighing up to 1,200 pounds.
Asian Elephant: The second-largest land animal, smaller than African elephants but still massive, with males reaching 3 meters in height.
Gaur: A large wild ox or Indian bison, with adult males weighing 1,000-1,200 kilograms.
Hippopotamus: A large herbivorous mammal, weighing around 3 tons and measuring up to 4 meters in length.
Pelagornis: A prehistoric bird with a wingspan estimated at seven meters, one of the largest flying birds ever discovered.
#NationalGeographic #Top10BiggestBeastsEver #TopBiggestBeastsEver #BiggestBeasts
National Geographic Top 10 Biggest Beasts
National Geographic's "Top 10 Biggest Beasts Ever" is a documentary special that explores the largest animals of their kind to have ever roamed the planet, focusing on prehistoric giants before human dominance. The program uses advanced CGI to visualize these colossal creatures, including birds with wingspans rivaling airplanes and dinosaurs comparable in size to a Boeing 737, bringing their lives vividly back to life through dramatic size comparisons and scientific analysis.
The documentary was originally aired in 2015 and features experts uncovering the latest discoveries and adaptations that allowed these supersized species to thrive.
Saltwater Crocodile: The largest living reptile, with a maximum recorded mass of 2,000 kg (4,409 lbs) and a length up to 7 meters.
Blue Whale: The largest animal ever known to have existed, averaging 30 meters in length and weighing up to 200 tons.
African Elephant: The largest land animal, with males reaching up to 4 meters in height and weighing up to 6 tons.
Giraffe: The tallest land animal, with an average height of 4.7 meters.
Ostrich: The largest bird by weight, reaching heights of 2-3 meters.
Polar Bear: The largest carnivorous bear, with adult males weighing up to 1,200 pounds.
Asian Elephant: The second-largest land animal, smaller than African elephants but still massive, with males reaching 3 meters in height.
Gaur: A large wild ox or Indian bison, with adult males weighing 1,000-1,200 kilograms.
Hippopotamus: A large herbivorous mammal, weighing around 3 tons and measuring up to 4 meters in length.
Pelagornis: A prehistoric bird with a wingspan estimated at seven meters, one of the largest flying birds ever discovered.
#NationalGeographic #Top10BiggestBeastsEver #TopBiggestBeastsEver #BiggestBeasts
Category
🐳
AnimalsTranscript
00:00:00Before humans ruled the world, planet Earth was a land of giants.
00:00:11Snakes the length of buses.
00:00:14I am still to this day completely amazed by this animal.
00:00:17Ocean killers with jaws big enough to swallow a person whole.
00:00:22These jaws were able to rip out this big chunk of car.
00:00:25And predators that dwarf T-Rex.
00:00:30We're talking something of enormous length, that could slice you with one motion.
00:00:36But of all the creatures that have ever lived, which is the biggest?
00:00:43Using the latest discoveries and cutting-edge science,
00:00:46we're going to reveal a top 10 of the biggest beasts ever.
00:00:51That have walked the Earth, swum the seas, and soared the skies.
00:00:57This is awesome.
00:01:00Analyzing the ultimate giant beasts across the animal kingdom, species by species,
00:01:06and using length as our ultimate guide, we count down from 10.
00:01:12Analyzing the ultimate giant beasts across the animal kingdom, species by species,
00:01:18and using length as our ultimate guide, we count down from 10.
00:01:26And first on our list is a creature you'd never expect.
00:01:32And first on our list is a creature you'd never expect.
00:01:37A terrifying beast.
00:01:39The biggest insect that ever lived.
00:01:42Long before the dinosaurs, a winged giant terrorized the skies.
00:02:01Flying at over 20 miles per hour, and with jaws that could cut small reptiles to pieces,
00:02:07its common name is the griffin fly.
00:02:15A clue to this ancient megabug was discovered in 1940 in Noble County, Oklahoma, in the southern United States.
00:02:24Today, it's the job of insect expert Brian Farrell to take care of that clue.
00:02:35A fragile fossil that's 275 million years old.
00:02:42This really is a spectacular fossil.
00:02:49This fossil is the largest insect wing ever discovered.
00:02:55To get an idea of just how big this insect was, this is a reasonably large-sized modern dragonfly.
00:03:02For comparison, it's about one-fifth the size at most of this Meganeuropsis.
00:03:06Looking at this single wing, it's clear just how big the griffin fly could get.
00:03:22It had four wings, the biggest pair spanning two and a half feet across.
00:03:28That makes it six times larger than many modern dragonflies.
00:03:37If it was around today, it would be a match for a hawk.
00:03:42And span the outstretched arm of a six-foot man.
00:03:48From smaller but more complete fossils, experts have discovered that griffin flies didn't merely
00:03:52look like today's dragonflies. Their anatomy was incredibly similar.
00:03:59So it's likely that they behaved the same way too, as deadly hunters.
00:04:06Antony Leonardo is a world expert in dragonfly flight.
00:04:12He's unlocking the secrets of what makes these flying aces such expert killer beasts.
00:04:19They have four wings that can beat independently.
00:04:22If you look at the wings closely, you can see that they're quite amazing.
00:04:25The dragonfly can fly forwards, backwards, upside down.
00:04:28It can also pull these incredibly sharp 6G turns.
00:04:31They also have eyes with virtually 360-degree vision.
00:04:38Powerful legs for grabbing insect prey.
00:04:42And killer jaws.
00:04:44They have these massive mandibles and these kind of pinching crunchers.
00:04:47And they very quickly cut and slice all this prey into little bits that the animal then swallows.
00:04:52But how did the griffin fly get so big?
00:04:59And why are modern dragonflies so much smaller?
00:05:03The answer lies in the way all other insects breathe.
00:05:07Insects don't have lungs.
00:05:09On the outside of the dragonfly's body are little openings called spiracles.
00:05:13And these are little holes that open and close.
00:05:16And they basically are little pumps flooding air into the dragonfly's body and then pushing it back out.
00:05:23Once through the spiracles, the air moves through a network of tubes called trachea.
00:05:29This way, oxygen is fed directly to every single cell of the body.
00:05:35The problem is, there are so many tubes, there's little room left for muscle.
00:05:39And that's what stops today's dragonflies getting any larger.
00:05:47So how did they ever reach the monstrous size of the griffin fly?
00:05:59How did they pack enough muscle into their bodies to power giant wings?
00:06:02One paleobiologist at Midwestern University, John Vandenbrooks, believes he has the answer.
00:06:15He's doing experiments to uncover the secrets to what makes a bigger bug.
00:06:19John thinks that growing bigger was all down to the amount of oxygen in the air they breathe.
00:06:34Oxygen was much higher in the past.
00:06:37Today, oxygen is about 21 percent of the atmosphere around you.
00:06:40In the past, it was as high as 31 percent.
00:06:43An extra 10 percent might not sound like much, but that's 50 percent more oxygen than we breathe today.
00:06:52So perhaps that increase in oxygen in the atmosphere is what led to the possibility
00:06:57that those insects could get as large as they did.
00:07:03To investigate, John decided to do something radical.
00:07:09Change the oxygen the bugs could breathe.
00:07:13First, he takes cockroaches and breeds them at far lower levels of oxygen than today.
00:07:19In this top chamber, we have cockroaches reared under lower oxygen levels, about 12 percent.
00:07:27And you can see how large this individual is.
00:07:30It may look large, but it's actually small for the species.
00:07:35John then rears other roaches at the oxygen levels of the past.
00:07:38Comparatively, the cockroaches reared down here are being reared in a high oxygen level of about 31 percent.
00:07:49And you can see now how large this individual is.
00:07:52Much, much larger than those reared at the lower oxygen levels.
00:07:57And it's even more pronounced if we're able to compare the two animals.
00:08:01The results are clear and astonishing.
00:08:07More oxygen means bugs can have a smaller internal breathing system.
00:08:11We can now definitively say, as oxygen goes up, it actually allows for the animal to put more
00:08:17things inside its body. So it can have more muscle. And it can become one of these really large,
00:08:22vicious predators that we see 300 million years ago.
00:08:26And we've been around to witness it, the griffin fly would have been a truly terrifying sight.
00:08:40This was the biggest insect ever to fly Earth's skies.
00:08:45But our next beast is far, far bigger.
00:08:56The
00:08:58Fast forward from griffin fly to 27 million years ago.
00:09:02Then the skies were ruled by a feathered giant.
00:09:07With wings as wide as a two-lane highway and a cruise speed faster than Usain Bolt,
00:09:13it could travel to every corner of the planet.
00:09:15The evidence of this giant first came to life in South Carolina in the USA.
00:09:34In 2010, paleontologist Dan Sepka discovered a collection of bones in a storeroom of the Charleston Museum.
00:09:41When we pulled open the drawer and I saw this for the first time, it was just absolutely spectacular.
00:09:50Laying the bones out, Dan could see this was no ordinary find.
00:09:55It has this skull with these bony, toothed jaws that almost looks like a crocodile.
00:10:01But it wasn't any kind of reptile.
00:10:05What Dan had discovered was the largest flying bird of all time.
00:10:10A new species they called Pelagornis sandersi.
00:10:16This massive element here is the humerus.
00:10:19This is the first bone of the wing skeleton.
00:10:21So it's equivalent to the upper arm bone in a human skeleton.
00:10:25This bone in particular is longer than my entire arm.
00:10:28And so we have a remarkably long wing.
00:10:34The giant bird's body was six feet long.
00:10:37With a 24 feet wingspan, the largest bird alive today, the wandering albatross, could fit easily under one of its wings.
00:10:51Pelagornis' wingspan rivaled that of a harrier jump jet.
00:10:58Everything about the skeleton tells us this bird must have flown.
00:11:01But how could something this big possibly have stayed airborne?
00:11:09A closer look at the bones provides Dan with a vital clue.
00:11:14Like flying birds today, its bones are hollow and super thin.
00:11:18The bone wall is about a millimeter thick.
00:11:22And so this animal would have been a very light weight for its size.
00:11:25There's less weight to support in flight.
00:11:29It rivaled the wingspan of a fighter jet.
00:11:31But this giant bird weighed only 48 pounds.
00:11:36Less than a third of the weight of an adult human.
00:11:42Light as it was, one bone still cast doubt on its ability to fly.
00:11:46So this bone, the scapula, is the equivalent to our own shoulder blade.
00:11:51And you can see it's just so small.
00:11:53It's actually almost comically small.
00:11:55And this certainly reveals that this bird was not a high-powered flapper.
00:12:03If it wasn't flapping its wings, how did Pelagornis fly?
00:12:09Flight biomechanics expert Mike Habib believes the answer lies with this.
00:12:13I'm out here to try hang gliding for the first time.
00:12:18I'm really excited.
00:12:19I'm hoping this will give me some idea of what being a Pelagornis will be like.
00:12:25A hang glider has a similar wingspan to Pelagornis.
00:12:29It's also lightweight, has a hollow tubular skeleton, and a large rigid wing.
00:12:35The physics don't change, so an airplane wing or a hang glider wing looks fundamentally very
00:12:41similar to an animal wing, even though they're made of different stuff.
00:12:46The only way Mike or Pelagornis could get airborne would be to run into the wind.
00:12:53Hoping that I run properly and we launch and I don't have to be like one of these people
00:12:57that gets dragged along on their face.
00:12:58Okay, are you ready to take off?
00:13:00I'm ready to take off.
00:13:01Okay.
00:13:09This is awesome.
00:13:14Oh man, this is giving me a little bit of a glimpse of what it would be like to be a
00:13:19giant flying animal in the past.
00:13:22This is an amazing feat of engineering and it's a great way of soaring.
00:13:26But Pelagornis did a lot better.
00:13:3127 million years ago, nature produced a glider that was about four times more efficient than
00:13:37this hang glider.
00:13:40In fact, Pelagornis was a better glider than anything that has ever lived,
00:13:45or that technology has ever produced.
00:13:47So we were in the air for a good 10 minutes, nice long flight.
00:13:59But Pelagornis would have been one of the champions of long distance flight.
00:14:04Probably could stay in the air for weeks at a time, maybe even months at a time.
00:14:10Staying aloft for long periods was essential for Pelagornis.
00:14:13It's bony teeth, ideal for catching fish, reveal it was a seabird.
00:14:2427 million years ago, Pelagornis was living in this open sea environment.
00:14:29Pelagornis could probably travel across thousands of miles of ocean without much thought.
00:14:33So how did Pelagornis manage such an extraordinary feat?
00:14:41Dan thinks the clue may lie with the modern master of ocean flight.
00:14:47The wandering albatross.
00:14:50Albatrosses make use of the way air flowing over the oceans can change speed.
00:14:55They perform a daredevil maneuver called dynamic soaring.
00:15:01Dan believes if Pelagornis was to survive out at sea, it must have done the same thing.
00:15:07So if we look at the waves, the wind above the waves is going more slowly than the wind higher
00:15:14up at a higher altitude above the waves, especially out on the open seas.
00:15:17And dynamic soaring birds can use this to their advantage.
00:15:20They swoop down to the ocean surface, then pull up at the last second.
00:15:29Pulling up gives a bird enough momentum to rise up and catch faster moving air currents.
00:15:38Flying in loops like this, Pelagornis would have been able to cover vast distances
00:15:43and grab fish from the surface whilst burning very little energy.
00:15:51This was the biggest and most efficient flying bird in the history of the planet.
00:15:57It ruled the ocean skies.
00:16:06Pelagornis was at the limit of how big birds could grow and still get into the air.
00:16:12But if you think that's big, coming up at number eight is an absolute whopper.
00:16:20It's time.
00:16:29Imagine walking into a modern zoo where they'd somehow managed to resurrect
00:16:33the largest mammal to walk the earth.
00:16:37What you'd see is this.
00:16:4020 tons of hide-bound flesh standing more than two stories tall.
00:16:44Evidence of this ancient mega-mammal emerged in the 20th century in what is now Pakistan.
00:16:58But today, this evidence is far from Asia.
00:17:03Paleontologist Mikhail Fortelius is investigating an extraordinary collection of the beast's bones
00:17:09in London's Natural History Museum.
00:17:11Easy.
00:17:14This colossal skull is testimony to its sheer size.
00:17:19The head sits on a very long neck.
00:17:23There's never been anything similar to this.
00:17:28Put all the bones together and you get something that looks like a cross
00:17:32between a giraffe and an elephant.
00:17:35It's called Paraceratherium.
00:17:39It was so big, a six-feet man could easily fit between its legs.
00:17:44It stood 25 feet high.
00:17:49It was nearly twice as tall and three times as heavy as the biggest land mammal today,
00:17:54the African elephant.
00:17:55And at 26 feet from nose to tail, it was as long as an Abrams battle tank.
00:18:08Now the obvious question has to be, why did it get so big?
00:18:15But there's an added complication.
00:18:19While some scientists believe the Paraceratherium lived in thick forests,
00:18:23Mikhail Fortelius thinks this creature's habitat was harsh.
00:18:31Afflicted by dry seasons when water was scarce and vegetation sparse.
00:18:38How does an animal become a giant when food is in short supply?
00:18:44Mikhail Fortelius believes the answer lies in the teeth.
00:18:48Looking at the teeth will allow us to understand why this animal got so very large.
00:18:57The teeth are worn in a way that only happens when you're eating leaves.
00:19:03And for eating leaves, sheer height would give this animal a massive advantage.
00:19:09Like a giraffe, it could get to food that's beyond the reach of most animals.
00:19:13So that explains Paraceratherium's height, but not its massive bulk.
00:19:22Fortelius believes that the explanation for that can be found in the harsh environment itself.
00:19:28That the animal grew big because of, not in spite of, its tough surroundings.
00:19:32If you're small, just one day without water is a terrible thing and may kill you.
00:19:42But the larger you are, the more buffered you are, the more you can deal with harshness in this sense.
00:19:49You can go without food, without water. I think that's what was driving the size increase.
00:19:55Not everyone agrees with Fortelius's theory.
00:20:00But there's no doubt that somehow Paraceratherium thrived.
00:20:07And it must have consumed vast quantities of vegetation every day.
00:20:11To find enough food, it needed to range over hundreds of square miles.
00:20:20And that may be the reason for what is perhaps the most remarkable thing about this amazing animal.
00:20:28Its feet.
00:20:31Biomechanics expert John Hutchinson has analyzed Paraceratherium's foot bones and produced a 3D model.
00:20:38He's struck by just how much it resembles that of one of today's giants.
00:20:44The rhinoceros.
00:20:47In fact, weighing in at only one-sixth of its size, the rhino is Paraceratherium's closest living relative.
00:20:56And Hutchinson's research shows that in terms of size to weight, its feet must bear the heaviest loads.
00:21:02Rhinoceros, the pressures of its feet are way higher than in a horse, a human, even an elephant.
00:21:11Rhinos already today are living at an extreme in terms of foot pressure.
00:21:15And Paraceratherium seems to have pushed that extreme further.
00:21:21On the feet of both the rhino and its ancient cousin, there are three gigantic, hoof-like nails.
00:21:28There's also a fatty pad designed to act as a shock absorber.
00:21:36The Paraceratherium's foot is proportionally more slender than a rhino's, meaning it has to bear even more stress.
00:21:45My calculations suggest that Paraceratherium might have borne as much as 50% more pressure on its feet than our rhinoceros does.
00:21:54In fact, this was the heaviest mammal ever to walk the earth.
00:22:03And John's calculations suggest one extraordinary fact.
00:22:06Paraceratherium would have put more pressure on its feet than an average tank's treads would put on the ground.
00:22:16That's pretty staggering.
00:22:18This was the biggest land mammal ever.
00:22:23And with footsteps this heavy, you'd have been well advised to stay out of its path.
00:22:31So far on top 10 biggest beasts ever, we've met
00:22:36a deadly dragonfly the size of a hawk,
00:22:38a giant bird the size of a plane,
00:22:44and a mega mammal twice the size of an African elephant.
00:22:48But next up is an even bigger beast that could launch into the skies.
00:23:00This is the closest earth has ever got to a real life winged dragon.
00:23:1870 million years ago, while the dinosaurs ruled the earth, the skies were ruled by pterosaurs.
00:23:25Their name means winged lizards.
00:23:32And paleontologist Gareth Dyke has spent more than 10 years of his life hunting them.
00:23:40Pterosaurs are interesting because they're the first group of vertebrates to evolve powered flight,
00:23:45long before birds and long before bats.
00:23:48The hunt has brought him to Romania, to the region of Transylvania.
00:24:01Better known as the home of that legendary monster, Dracula.
00:24:1370 million years ago, the climate in this area was much different.
00:24:16Big islands in a tropical sea with lush vegetation, lots of animal and plant life,
00:24:22and quite high temperatures couldn't be more different to the weather today.
00:24:28These red sandstone cliffs hold a huge number of fossils.
00:24:32As the rock erodes, more and more are revealed.
00:24:37So what we have here are some of the bones of pterosaurs that we've collected from this area
00:24:41in the last few years. This one, for example, it's about six centimetres in length.
00:24:46So it would have come from an animal that would have had a wingspan of one or two metres,
00:24:50six feet. Average size for pterosaurs.
00:24:56But then, in 2008, Gareth's colleagues climbed down the cliffs and discovered something extraordinary.
00:25:03This neck vertebra from the same part of the neck in a giant pterosaur.
00:25:10It's quite short, quite robust, but gigantic compared to a normal-sized pterosaur vertebra that you can see here.
00:25:18And you can see immediately that we're looking at animals of gigantic proportions.
00:25:22When the neck bone was mapped onto a model of the pterosaur skeleton,
00:25:29it became clear that this was one of the largest members of the pterosaur family ever discovered.
00:25:36Comparable to giant specimens found in the USA.
00:25:39At up to 16 feet tall, these massive pterosaurs could stand nearly three times taller than a human.
00:25:50Tall enough to look a giraffe in the eye.
00:25:52The front limbs were also vast wings that, when unfurled, could stretch up to 36 feet across.
00:26:01The same as a modern Learjet.
00:26:03It had a beak more than five feet long, perfectly suited to preying off other animals.
00:26:12And no living creature has ever had a larger wingspan.
00:26:18While it seems obvious that giant pterosaurs flew, they're so large,
00:26:23experts have puzzled over how they ever got off the ground.
00:26:26We already know that Pelagornis, with its 24 feet wingspan, was as big as a bird could get and still fly.
00:26:38The difficulty of just getting off the ground at this size stopped flying birds getting any bigger.
00:26:45So how did a 550 pound pterosaur with a 36 feet wingspan get into the air?
00:26:56Flight biomechanics expert Mike Habib has made it his mission to find out.
00:27:02He has been studying the bones of one particular giant pterosaur, Quetzalcoatlus.
00:27:12Discovered in Texas, this species is of similar giant size to the one found in Transylvania.
00:27:21Mike focused his attention on the pterosaur's wing.
00:27:26This is the skeleton of Quetzalcoatlus. You can see the massive bones of the wing.
00:27:31This is called the humerus. It's the bone of the upper arm.
00:27:35Mike conducted a forensic analysis of the bones.
00:27:39I used CT scans to look inside of the bones. And I found that most of the bones in the wing
00:27:45were very hollow. The bone wall of it is only three millimeters thick. It's mostly air by volume.
00:27:50This makes the skeleton very light. But inside the upper arm bone, a dense internal scaffold
00:27:57reinforces the bone, especially near the shoulder. And that's not something you see in a bird wing.
00:28:04This bone is far stronger than needed for flight. Stronger even than needed for walking.
00:28:11So why would the pterosaur possibly need such powerful forelimbs?
00:28:19Then Mike noticed another clue. A giant groove in the bone.
00:28:23A giant tendon would run in along the groove here and then wrap around the wing pivot joint.
00:28:36And ends up at the tip of the wing. The tendon would have been about as big around as my wrist.
00:28:47The super size of this tendon led Mike to form a unique theory.
00:28:54The pterosaurs were using the tendon's elastic power to catapult themselves into the air.
00:29:01Tendons and the muscles attached to them have a certain amount of springiness.
00:29:06You can stretch them and then they snap back. Basically a giant crossbow.
00:29:12Mike used the skeleton to model how this might work.
00:29:17A giant pterosaur like this one to take off would start by crouching on its back legs.
00:29:23Then it would unload the legs first, vaulting over the giant wing.
00:29:28And then it would push against the ground, using up all that stored energy
00:29:32and pushing itself as fast as possible into the air.
00:29:36There is still one living creature that uses this kind of vaulting launch.
00:29:42It's plain to see when you watch a vampire bat take off.
00:29:47But vampire bats only weigh two ounces.
00:29:51So could the same principle work on the scale of a giant pterosaur?
00:29:59Mike has come to a local firing range to find out.
00:30:02So what we have here is a modern crossbow and it's a very effective way of talking about pterosaurs.
00:30:12Giant pterosaurs would be stretching its tendons by crouching.
00:30:16And the crouch phase would be much slower than the launch phase.
00:30:20So it puts the energy in slowly and then lets it out quick.
00:30:23So I'm going to put in the energy here nice and slow.
00:30:27You'll notice that the limbs on the crossbow are bending.
00:30:30That's the energy being stored in the flexing of the limbs.
00:30:35There's a lot of energy in here.
00:30:37And when I let it out to fire the bolt, it's going to go really, really fast.
00:30:41This catapult crossbow stores so much energy, it can fire a bolt at up to 218 miles per hour.
00:30:50Wow, it's a lot of energy in this bow. It doesn't have much kick because it's really well engineered,
00:31:01but you can tell that bolt's coming out there real fast.
00:31:08The crossbow can fire this lightweight bolt hundreds of feet through the air.
00:31:12Not a bad shot.
00:31:14But how do these mechanics scale up to a 550-pound pterosaur?
00:31:23By storing all this energy in this giant tendon, big pterosaurs would have been able to take off
00:31:27like a rocket, launching a mass about the same as a grizzly bear into the air in under half a second.
00:31:36Mike calculated that pterosaurs only needed to get six feet off the ground.
00:31:40That would give them just enough room to unfurl their vast wings and beat for the first time.
00:31:52Then when they're airborne, just like giant birds, they glide.
00:31:56These giants were the largest flying creatures ever.
00:32:10But they would have been no match for the next beast on our list.
00:32:16A snake of astonishing size.
00:32:19This is the story of a creature that looks like it belongs in a Hollywood B-movie.
00:32:36It begins in 2004 in the Colombian region of Cerrojón.
00:32:52A vast mining operation had exposed a fossilized forest,
00:32:56dating to just after the extinction of the dinosaurs.
00:32:59Paleontologist Jonathan Block led an expedition to the site.
00:33:06He returned with something extraordinary.
00:33:10This is what we found.
00:33:12This is a recognizable vertebra.
00:33:14When we originally discovered this, we thought maybe it was the vertebra of a crocodile.
00:33:19But this was no crocodile.
00:33:24John had identified the vertebra of the largest snake ever to roam the earth.
00:33:30Titanoboa.
00:33:33This is the largest vertebra from the backbone of a 17-foot long anaconda,
00:33:38which is the most massive snake alive today.
00:33:40When you compare the anaconda vertebra to the 60-million-year-old fossil,
00:33:48Titanoboa's true size becomes clear.
00:33:54That comparison is really incredibly dramatic. It even still takes my breath away.
00:34:00Using the anatomy of today's giant snakes as a guide,
00:34:03Block's team set about reconstructing Titanoboa's skeleton,
00:34:08piecing together the fragments.
00:34:13They called in fossil snake expert Jason Head to verify their findings.
00:34:20The numbers that we kept getting were so incredible in terms of its weight and its length and its girth.
00:34:26At first, I was suspicious we were doing the math right.
00:34:29At two and a half feet across, Titanoboa would struggle to fit through your front door.
00:34:40Weighing in at over a ton, it would be four times heavier than the largest snakes alive today.
00:34:48And at 45 feet, it would be as long as an American school bus.
00:34:52So we're looking at a lower jaw that would have been, you know, this long.
00:35:01About four times the size of a large giant python today.
00:35:04Titanoboa theoretically could have probably opened its mouth wide enough for you or I to actually stand in it.
00:35:08Right.
00:35:10What's clear is that this snake was simply too large to live on land.
00:35:15Because it was such a massive snake, it would have had trouble supporting its own weight.
00:35:19This animal probably would have had to spend most if not all of its time in the water.
00:35:25And it would have found plenty to prey on.
00:35:30In its ecosystem, Titanoboa lived with giant crocodilians,
00:35:34lived with giant turtles and these giant fishes.
00:35:36And it probably could have eaten all of them.
00:35:41It's some 60 million years since Titanoboa became extinct.
00:35:45So it's a little difficult to meet one now.
00:35:47But again, experts can use today's snakes to get close.
00:35:56This is a reticulated python, the longest species alive today.
00:36:03These are the closest living relatives to Titanoboa.
00:36:06And a lot of their anatomy is similar to Titanoboa.
00:36:08And from that, we infer very similar behaviors.
00:36:11Constriction, ambush predation.
00:36:13In the case of anacondas, living in aquatic environments.
00:36:19At this moment in our interview, Goldie the python chooses to flex her muscles.
00:36:25That's better.
00:36:26This isn't an attempt to treat Jason as prey.
00:36:29It's simply her normal movement.
00:36:31Is she in a good mood still?
00:36:33But when actually on the hunt, she's deadly.
00:36:36When boas and pythons constrict their prey, they're putting so much pressure on the circulatory
00:36:41system of the prey animal that they actually induce a heart attack.
00:36:44They can stop the heart by squeezing so hard.
00:36:49Snakes have been recorded constricting at 25 pounds per square inch.
00:36:52Delivered by a snake Titanoboa's size, that would easily be enough to crush prey as big as a rhino.
00:37:05To find out what this kind of force looks like, snake expert Rhys Jones is overseeing a little test,
00:37:12using a collection of heavy machinery.
00:37:14We've got an experiment set up which will help us to try and visualise exactly the type of forces needed to
00:37:24overcome these huge prey items. So what we've got here, we've got a truck that is fixed in place.
00:37:30This big yellow rope here is representative of our snake and it's got, as you can see, two coils here
00:37:36around this oil drum. The oil drum is representing our prey item. It's full of water, it's sealed,
00:37:43that's going to take some pressure to be able to crush that. So we're going to need muscle.
00:37:50Cue a seven ton tractor with a 190 horsepower engine. This versus a sealed barrel ought to be a tough test.
00:38:00As the tractor pulls on, the pressure passes 25 psi. That's the pressure of today's largest snakes.
00:38:15But Titanoboa had four times the muscle mass. And estimates say it could pull off crushing
00:38:23forces of up to 110 pounds per square inch. The same pressure as having an eight ton truck
00:38:30parked on your chest.
00:38:43It's just squeezed it like a toy, doesn't it? It's just incredible. I think our snake pretty much nailed it.
00:38:53It only took 55 psi to burst the barrel. Half what Titanoboa might have done.
00:39:04More than enough to crush the life out of any living thing.
00:39:08I mean, look at the damage to this oil drum. Could you imagine if that type of
00:39:13pressure was applied to you? You wouldn't last two seconds.
00:39:18Titanoboa's phenomenal crushing force made it the apex predator on earth
00:39:22for 10 million years.
00:39:39Titanoboa was the largest snake in earth's history.
00:39:45Nearly twice the wingspan of the biggest flying bird.
00:39:48Titanoboa was the largest flying bird and nine feet longer than the wingspan of the largest flying creature.
00:39:56But as massive as this predator was, next up is a beast even bigger and more terrifying.
00:40:03Titanoboa was the largest flying bird and a giant turtle.
00:40:12At first glance, this beast looks like a cross between a giant turtle and a mega crocodile.
00:40:21But what this submarine-sized sea monster really was,
00:40:25and how it became apex predator, has become a hundred million year old mystery.
00:40:33It's true.
00:40:34In 2003, new evidence came to light on the south coast of the UK.
00:40:43If you're looking for fossils, the Jurassic Coast of Dorset is one of the most fertile hunting grounds on earth.
00:40:51Kevin Sheehan has been coming here for more than 40 years.
00:40:54i saw three pieces of what i thought was fossilized wood i got really excited because i thought wow
00:41:03this is there's got to be more of this and then joy of joys there's this huge piece of bone stuck
00:41:11it's almost like a meteorite has gone bang into the cliff embedded in the cliff were dozens of
00:41:17pieces of fossil reassembled they made something incredible the most complete skull ever discovered
00:41:27of a pliosaurus paleontologist richard forest is an expert on these ancient monsters
00:41:34this is a giant killing machine this pliosaur was the top predator it was the peak of the pyramid
00:41:43they were basically just big powerful brutes that devastated anything in their way it's an awesome
00:41:51animal the biggest known pliosaurus had flippers nine feet long that's like a basketball player
00:42:00at full stretch if it swam in today's waters it would have been bigger than a navy patrol boat
00:42:07that's 45 feet in terms of weight it would have taken about 44 compact cars to balance out one
00:42:16pliosaurus
00:42:17the strongest biter alive today is the saltwater crocodile with a bite force of 1.8 tons
00:42:29pliosaurus pliosaurus had a bite nearly 10 times stronger it was the t-rex of the ocean
00:42:37we have these great teeth at the front which is where it grabs the prey that's what catches it
00:42:43then it moves a bit further back then another set of teeth and these are the ones that cut the prey up
00:42:48into pieces then you have these teeth which are hooked backwards so once the prey gets to there
00:42:54there's no way out but that throws up questions if you're going to bite something you've got to be
00:43:04able to catch it first so how does a 45 feet predator the size of a large shipping container keep up with
00:43:12its prey the secret must lie in their four boat-sized flippers the closest match to a pliosaurus flipper
00:43:23today belongs to a creature altogether less frightening penguins may look funny when they
00:43:29waddle on land but underwater they're like rockets whizzing around at speeds of up to 20 miles per hour
00:43:42biomechanics expert flavio knocker is trying to understand how they reach these extraordinary speeds
00:43:47using a high-speed camera he films penguins moving around underwater
00:43:56this camera is actually able to go up to 12 000 images per second that means that every minute detail
00:44:05of flipper action is captured
00:44:10flavio's footage reveals the penguins aren't swimming with their flippers
00:44:14they are flapping them like a bird they're flying underwater and by twisting their wings as they flap
00:44:23penguins can propel themselves forward on the upstroke as well as on the downstroke
00:44:28which is something most airborne birds can't do the pliosaurus had not two but four flippers and they were
00:44:39gigantic all signs point to this mega monster being not only one of the biggest but also one of the
00:44:46fastest predators in the ocean
00:44:48aerospace engineer luke muskard is investigating how they moved
00:44:57using x-rays of fossils luke has recreated a pair of pliosaur flippers he calls wings
00:45:04pliosaurs were really good swimmers and the aim of the game is to chase down the prey obviously to do
00:45:08that you need to be very fast you need to have a high thrust and a high acceleration
00:45:12by suspending the wings in a tank he's trying to determine how the front and back wings work
00:45:19together to propel the pliosaurus
00:45:24blue and red dyes reveal how each wing moves the water
00:45:30luke moves the wings together in different ways and records the amount of propulsion generated
00:45:34he notices certain movements have a remarkable effect on the back wing
00:45:43so initial results suggest that the hind wing can produce a thrust which is about 50 percent higher
00:45:50than a wing operating on its own
00:45:54by harnessing the wake of the front wing the pliosaurus could generate two and a half
00:45:59times as much thrust as it would with just one set of wings
00:46:06and that is how this mega beast gains sudden and tremendous acceleration
00:46:12its prey wouldn't have stood a chance
00:46:14pliosaurus is just the latest on our lineup of the top 10 biggest beasts ever
00:46:32so far we've revealed griffin fly the biggest insect in earth's history pelagornis the largest flying bird
00:46:44paraceriferium the greatest mammal to walk the earth giant pterosaurs the largest flying creatures ever
00:46:56titanoboa the largest known snake of all time
00:47:04and pliosaurus the largest predatory marine reptile
00:47:09but coming up is a bizarre dinosaur that beats them all
00:47:14the largest dinosaur
00:47:22new discoveries of one of the strangest dinosaurs ever are rewriting the textbooks
00:47:28a monster dinosaur with vicious teeth
00:47:32claws almost as big as a human arm
00:47:35we're talking something of enormous length that could slice you with one motion
00:47:39and a massive spiny sail the spines are taller than a person
00:47:47every now and then we come across really bizarre dinosaurs
00:47:51in my book it's the most bizarre dinosaur out there
00:47:54paleontologist nizar ibrahim was on expedition to the sahara desert in morocco in 2013
00:48:10when he saw the beast's bones he knew he had something special
00:48:14this was a spinosaurus or spine lizard it lived 100 million years ago
00:48:25everything about spinosaurus is vast
00:48:29seeing it in front of you you realize wow this is one big predator
00:48:33that seven feet spiny sail means spinosaurus stands twice as tall as a human
00:48:44at 50 feet long from snout to tail it is 10 feet longer than t-rex
00:48:50it's so big it's the size of a fire truck
00:48:53weighing in of 22 tons this is the biggest predator to ever walk the earth
00:49:02but spinosaurus wasn't the only dangerous dino on the block
00:49:07a hundred million years ago this desert was a vast river system bursting with other giant predators
00:49:15i call it the river of giants because it was home to giant fish giant flying reptiles
00:49:20several t-rex sized predatory dinosaurs it was probably the most dangerous place in the history
00:49:26of our planet it's jam-packed with all these predators to the point where you say what were
00:49:31they living on where were the herbivores to support this many predators it was a mystery
00:49:38with so few plant-eating dinosaurs to feed on what enabled spinosaurus to survive here and become
00:49:45the biggest predator of all as nazar and his team looked closer at the bones they began to find clues
00:49:54strange features that marked this predator out from other dinosaurs like t-rex
00:50:03this animal didn't look anything like t-rex or other predatory dinosaurs
00:50:08it was like working on an alien from outer space
00:50:10for starters the teeth were an unusual shape spinosaurus it's really all about grabbing prey
00:50:19and holding it in these massive jaws with long conical teeth so these teeth are great to grab slippery prey
00:50:29at over five feet long these jaws were capable of swallowing prey the size of a person whole
00:50:40next nizar noticed that for a predatory dinosaur the front limbs were unusually long
00:50:48though not all experts agree nizar believed spinosaurus may have even walked on them
00:50:54and the back feet were just as strange
00:51:02now the feet of spinosaurus are really bizarre typically in predatory dinosaurs the claws will be
00:51:07recurved to grab prey and pin it to the ground in spinosaurus the claws are almost flat and they're
00:51:13quite wide almost looks like um a paddle and i think it's quite likely that the feet of spinosaurus
00:51:20were webbed just like in many birds or crocodiles this has more to do with paddling and swimming than running
00:51:28on land everything was pointing in one direction
00:51:31this looked like a beast that swam and hunted in water this was a dinosaur that was doing something
00:51:40no other predatory dinosaur was adapted to do this is a river monster this was an extraordinary discovery
00:51:49it suggested spinosaurus hunted fish giving it a major advantage over the other dinosaur predators
00:51:55but if spinosaurus was swimming how did it hunt how could something this bulky chase down enough
00:52:06fast-moving fish to grow to monster size
00:52:12to find out the team scanned the bones a ct scanner allowed scientists to record the fossils in 3d
00:52:20and see inside them
00:52:23suddenly the skull from another spinosaurus started to reveal new secrets this is the tip of the snout of
00:52:31spinosaurus so when you look at the outside of the snout you have all these openings and it's really unusual
00:52:38the ct scan revealed that inside the skull a complex network of tubes runs from the holes to the brain
00:52:50it's really a network of openings um and so clearly there's something happening there
00:52:56there's probably some kind of sensory function it reminded nazar of some of today's deadliest predators
00:53:03crocodilians
00:53:16crocs and alligators have similar holes on their snouts they're called foramina and for many years they too
00:53:24mystified experts
00:53:25neurobiologist daphne suarez made it her mission to find out what they were for
00:53:35wow as you can see these animals are really well adapted to living in the water
00:53:44daphne devised an unusual experiment she put young alligators into a tank
00:53:51blocked up the foramina on their snouts and then turned out the lights i have the animals in complete
00:53:57darkness so they can't see and their ears are covered so they can't hear then to mimic the movement of
00:54:04small prey falling in the water daphne hit upon using water droplets i'm using water droplets because they
00:54:12don't smell like anything with all their senses neutralized the alligators didn't react at all
00:54:21then daphne unblocked just the snout holes and repeated the drip test
00:54:29daphne's experiment revealed that the openings in the gator's snout hid pressure sensors
00:54:34that can pick up the tiniest motions in water
00:54:36this super sense gives crocs an astonishing reaction speed of five hundredths of a second
00:54:46as fast as a lamborghini gear shift
00:54:50the holes in spinosaurus's skull likely hid similar pressure sensors
00:54:56this is the super sense that allowed spinosaurus to become the ultimate predator
00:55:01you can just imagine spinosaurus plunging its huge jaws in the water and detecting movement and
00:55:09then catching prey
00:55:15this super sense and the ability to hunt in water as well as on land
00:55:20made spinosaurus the biggest predator to ever walk the earth
00:55:24but coming up the next giant beast is the biggest apex predator of all time
00:55:40stalking the oceans from 16 million to 3 million years ago the biggest apex predator ever megalodon
00:55:48the name simply means big tooth and it seems to have been the most voracious shark ever
00:55:56there was nothing that was safe from megalodon if it could catch it it could kill it
00:56:01much about this giant remains mysterious
00:56:08but new clues are coming to light in panama central america
00:56:12and of all places a cement quarry
00:56:21here giant excavators are digging through the bed of an ancient coastline
00:56:2710 million years ago this area was covered by water
00:56:31we know that because of the kinds of fossils we find here
00:56:35for example we find plenty of these shells that are typical from shallow water areas
00:56:39but as well as shells paleobiologist catalina pimiento is also finding megalodon teeth
00:56:49and there's something strange about them the teeth that we find here from megalodon are very small
00:56:56relative to the typical megalodon teeth that we find in other places
00:56:59i know these are megalodon teeth because in particular shape they are triangular and quite symmetrical
00:57:05but most importantly because of the serrations they have on their ages
00:57:10there's only one logical conclusion the reason is that most of them were babies or juveniles
00:57:18catalina has made an astonishing discovery the first ever evidence for a megalodon breeding ground
00:57:26this area right here is the first nursery area for megalodon
00:57:29but even amongst these infant specimens megalodon's extraordinary size was striking
00:57:37that baby's teeth were as big as those of today's deadly giants the adult great white
00:57:46this is a megalodon baby tooth and this is an adult gray white shark
00:57:49you can see here that the baby megalodon was as big as an adult gray white
00:57:55so imagine when they were born megalodon babies were huge
00:58:00the fact that catalina had to make her deductions using teeth alone isn't unusual
00:58:07in fact almost everything that experts know about megalodon comes from looking at its teeth
00:58:16we don't find the skeletons of megalodon because just like living sharks
00:58:19they're made of cartilage and after the shark dies the cartilage disintegrates
00:58:23but we do find their teeth and we can use these teeth to recreate what the jaws would have looked
00:58:29like when megalodon was alive what they tell us is that the adult megalodon was a goliath
00:58:39its jaws alone were up to seven feet high easily tall enough to swallow a person
00:58:46weighing in at a whopping hundred tons it was a hundred times heavier than an average great white
00:58:53and at 60 feet long it was the length of an articulated truck
00:59:03and that jaw up to 250 teeth lined the mouth in several rows with edges serrated like a steak knife
00:59:13i mean these teeth are just so powerful the massive jaw muscles that this animal had
00:59:19to close these jaws it would just dismember any animal that was alive on earth at that time
00:59:26and stephen has evidence of just what these jaws could do to pray
00:59:35we know from the size and shape of this bone that it is a dolphin tail vertebra it's right down near
00:59:41the fluke there are these deep gouges on either side the only way that this fossil could have these
00:59:49deep gouges was that it was bitten forcefully by a megalodon okay so if we look at a megalodon tooth
00:59:58so the upper jaw slams shut forcing the vertebra down into the wedge between two adjacent teeth
01:00:06deeply gouging the bone with such force that it probably severed the tail off
01:00:10everything points to an astonishingly powerful bite and one man who has set out to calculate exactly
01:00:20how strong that bite is is shark biomechanics expert dan huber
01:00:28dan starts with a ct scan of the skull of a modern great white
01:00:33after the white shark's head is ct scanned we can create a computer model of it we can see the lower
01:00:38in the upper jaws here and then we can apply virtual muscles to those virtual jaws and run
01:00:43simulations to figure out how hard it can bite next dan scales up to megalodon size
01:00:52and if we apply these numbers to what we think is the biggest megalodon that's ever existed
01:00:56its posterior bite force was about 41 000 pounds or about 18 500 kilograms
01:01:03that's like the weight of a garbage truck pressing down on the back teeth
01:01:08so what does a bite force of this size look like in action
01:01:17to find out dan is going on a mission
01:01:22he's joining up with the tampa fire brigade
01:01:29and a piece of kit they use for cutting victims out of crashed cars
01:01:33the jaws of life it's lightweight it's really easily deployable so is this thing going to be
01:01:44able to generate 41 000 pounds of bite force the corner of it absolutely that's exactly where it's
01:01:49going to cut so this shouldn't have any trouble at all when we need to cut open cars so that's
01:01:54actually pretty similar to what we're looking at with this ancient shark megalodon all right let's
01:01:58see what this thing can do all right let's do it
01:02:02first dan tries out the jaws on a cow bone
01:02:08something similar to what megalodon got to chew on let's go ahead
01:02:12see it split the thing in half no problem at all
01:02:27next up is the car
01:02:34the jaws of life can deliver the same kind of bite force as megalodon
01:02:39only far more slowly megalodon was capable of biting through the car in a split second
01:02:49from this we know the megalodon could tear through ancient whales we know that it could
01:02:53tear through ancient sea turtles and apparently could even tear through this car
01:02:58megalodon was the biggest predator that's ever existed and its bite force was the highest bite
01:03:03force that's ever happened in any animal in the history of the planet
01:03:09megalodon tops all other apex predators
01:03:16it was nearly one and a half times the length of titanoboa
01:03:22it was more than twice the mass of pliosaurus
01:03:27and it would have dwarfed spinosaurus
01:03:29but though this giant shark was the biggest apex predator ever it shared the oceans with something much
01:03:38much bigger
01:03:43of the largest living creatures on earth and the heaviest in history
01:03:56propelled by fast tails they spend much of their time in the deep oceans
01:04:00but every year come summer time blue whales appear in the waters just off los angeles
01:04:18for ecologist arry friedlander it's an unmissable opportunity to study them
01:04:22you get close up to them and you start to see how big they are you start remembering what it feels
01:04:28like to be this tiny little person in a pretty small boat next to this enormous whale
01:04:35it's kind of daunting you know they're they're huge
01:04:41the numbers are awe-inspiring the whales are so big compared to a person that 90 of us could fit
01:04:48on its tail alone it's 200 ton bulk makes it 30 times heavier than an african elephant
01:04:58and at 100 feet it's the same length as a boeing 737
01:05:05so how does a mammal get so big
01:05:14it's only when a whale washes up dead on the beach
01:05:16that scientists get a chance to really study their anatomy
01:05:22now we're in the rib cage of the whale and on either side of the rib cage would be the lungs
01:05:28you've got the heart you've got the stomach a heart the size of a car connects to a million miles of
01:05:36blood vessels enough to reach to the moon and back twice but there's one feature that's supersized
01:05:43beyond all others the mouth
01:05:49rather than hunting one big animal blue whales use their enormous mouths to catch entire shoals in one
01:05:56go they feed on tiny shrimp-like crustaceans called krill
01:06:03many people think that it's amazing that the largest animal that's ever existed feed on such a tiny animal
01:06:08but no blue whales going oh there's a krill i think i'll take that one what they're doing is they're
01:06:13trying to find huge dense swarms of krill and a prey atom for a blue whale is not one of these guys
01:06:18it's thousands and thousands and tens of thousands of these guys
01:06:23though the whale's gullet is so small it would choke on a loaf of bread
01:06:26it's mouth can take in 220 tons of water in one go
01:06:36for anything roughly comparable you'd have to look at something like this
01:06:43the dc-10 a specially modified firefighting airliner it swapped passenger seats for a massive water tank
01:06:51this is the biggest tanker flying in the world it carries 12 000 gallons or 44 000 liters of liquid
01:07:04which is roughly four to ten times the size of any other airplane used to fight forest fires the dc-10
01:07:14releases enough water to cover the length of 10 football pitches in a single drop
01:07:21but a blue whale picks up four times this much water in a single mouthful we're very proud of this
01:07:35machine but if the whale could fly we'd hire the whale because it's four times bigger the whale more than
01:07:43doubles its weight with each mouthful and what follows is one of the weirdest operations in the natural
01:07:50world when the whale opens its mouth to feed the water pushes its elephant-sized tongue all the way back to its belly button
01:08:02the tongue is super stretchy and expands out lining the mouth and creating a huge sack full of water and krill
01:08:10then mouth closed the whale rams the tongue forward like a piston
01:08:14it forces the water out through sieve-like grills called balines until only the krill is left inside
01:08:27the energy required to perform this maneuver is colossal
01:08:31in fact in a single day blue whales burn up to three million calories the equivalent of 10 000 hamburgers
01:08:41how does a creature burning this much energy find enough food to become a giant
01:08:46the answer must lie in how they hunt but as whales hunt krill hundreds of meters underwater witnessing this
01:08:55behavior has been almost impossible until now
01:09:05harry friedlander is using a tag that enables him to spy on whales even when they're deep below the surface
01:09:14it contains a camera and motion detectors like the ones found in a smartphone
01:09:19all he needs to do now is attach it to a 200-ton whale you always are a little nervous approaching them
01:09:30they're wild animals so you never know how they're going to react
01:09:34arry gets into position
01:09:40tag in place the whale disappears into the depths
01:09:43and arry returns to base to track it on his computer
01:09:50as he plots the whale's position in 3d he spots something extraordinary
01:09:57incredibly exciting up until now we basically thought they just went through the water
01:10:02taking these munches and lunging sort of in a straight line but we noticed the animals diving down
01:10:07to depth and then doing these 360 degree rolls this kind of acrobatic maneuvering is something we had
01:10:13no idea an animal this big could do images from the camera reveal the whale rolls just before it opens its
01:10:21mouth to feed this is the mechanism that allows whales to get so big if you're a whale your eyes are on the
01:10:29side of your head they don't have this binocular vision like we have where you can see directly
01:10:34forward so in order for that animal to see its prey in in front of it it kind of needs to roll its body
01:10:40so you maximize the amount of food you get and you limit the amount of energy it takes to do it
01:10:47far from just hoovering up krill like a 200 ton deep sea juggernaut
01:10:52it turns out the blue whale is the ocean's biggest acrobat
01:10:56so far on top 10 biggest beasts ever we've met the hawk sized griffin fly
01:11:10a bird the size of a fighter plane
01:11:15a mammal as big as a tank
01:11:16a pterosaur the size of a lear jet
01:11:25a snake the length of a school bus
01:11:29an ocean killer nearly 50 feet long
01:11:34a dinosaur that dwarfs t-rex
01:11:39a shark a hundred times heavier than a great white
01:11:42and the largest creature ever to swim earth's oceans
01:11:51the blue whale is very nearly the largest beast that's ever lived
01:11:58but there's one beast that's even longer and it takes the title of biggest beast ever
01:12:12so
01:12:18march 2015
01:12:20in southern argentina in the remote province of patagonia
01:12:24a team of paleontologists is on standby
01:12:27so
01:12:38lucio ibericu has been waiting for this moment for months
01:12:42okay
01:12:51inside this truck are some of the biggest bones on the planet
01:12:56it's very good very happy
01:12:59everything here now
01:13:02and after five years in the united states undergoing scientific analysis they're coming home
01:13:08more than 50 crates hold the bones of just one dinosaur
01:13:15each bone is enormous
01:13:18yet as big as they are these bones are just a clue to a creature that was even larger
01:13:24the biggest beast ever to walk the earth
01:13:30the journey to this moment began in 2005
01:13:33lucio was part of a team of paleontologists prospecting for dinosaur bones
01:13:42they were in a remote area of patagonia known as the badlands
01:13:4775 million years ago this area was completely different warmer more green
01:13:55humid a lot of vegetation and several rivers
01:13:59the ancient rocks revealed the area was once a perfect habitat for dinosaurs
01:14:06but today the lush forests have given way to harsh desert
01:14:15as the team surveyed the land one of them came upon a small piece of exposed bone
01:14:20the first thing that we see was the middle part of the femur so we start to dig and continue digging
01:14:30and continue digging and we never finish with that so say okay this is the femur but it's huge
01:14:38you sit there and you look at this object and you realize that you're the first person
01:14:43to ever see this thing you're the first person in history to to know about this
01:14:50you're the first person in history they had found a giant thigh bone over six feet long
01:14:58so this is the femur this is a leg bones it's bigger than me and it's just one bones this is amazing
01:15:10it's hard to imagine but bones of a beast bigger than this have occasionally been discovered
01:15:15but what was remarkable about this find was just how complete the skeleton was
01:15:22it took several expeditions to uncover it all
01:15:27at the end of three seasons of excavating there we had 145 bones and the state of them was surprising
01:15:35the preservation of the dinosaur was very good a lot of bones that we found are in the same position
01:15:43as when the dinosaur died
01:15:49the team were now in possession of what was effectively a time capsule
01:15:55one that could revolutionize our understanding of the biggest beasts to ever roam the earth
01:16:05ken took the bones back to his lab in philadelphia
01:16:11here careful cleaning 3d scanning and forensic examination all started to reveal how these
01:16:18extraordinary beasts looked and lived
01:16:25the beasts sheer size was apparent at every turn
01:16:28the scale just staggers the imagination this animal was 85 feet long from head to tail it was two
01:16:37and a half stories tall at the shoulder this was a new species of titanosaur a plant-eating dinosaur of
01:16:46almost unimaginable proportions ken named his titanosaur dreadnoughtus meaning fears nothing dreadnoughtus isn't
01:16:58going to have anything to worry about in terms of predation these are big nasty capable vigorous
01:17:04creatures that deserve a lot of respect
01:17:09dreadnoughtus was clearly a mine of information for the scientists
01:17:14but it held one surprise which relates directly to the size of the very biggest titanosaurs
01:17:22cutting into the bones ken started to find evidence of how old this dreadnoughtus was when it died
01:17:29you see here these big oval bone cells here that's indicative of bone that's not growing anymore
01:17:37and then as we move towards the outer edge of the bone you'll notice that that texture
01:17:44changes and that is indicative of rapidly growing bone and that could mean only one thing ken's dreadnoughtus
01:17:55though vast was not fully grown we know that it was growing rapidly when it died so 65 tons and not
01:18:03yet done growing that means there are bigger dreadnoughtus out there we don't know how big this dinosaur
01:18:08could have gotten but then comes another clue titanosaur wasn't like our other giants megalodon and blue whale it didn't start life at monster size
01:18:20paleontologist gerald ghrelit tinner has uncovered stunning evidence that reveals the last piece of the jigsaw
01:18:32he's investigating a site in northern argentina
01:18:34the
01:18:47so here we're sitting on the top of a geothermal formation
01:18:51at the time of the dinosaurs this area was a geothermal hot spot with steaming vents and hot water pools
01:19:01so
01:19:07gerald has found evidence that titanosaurs came here to lay their eggs
01:19:13what we have here is a clutch of about 24 25 titanosaur eggs
01:19:19and this one here it's probably the biggest one and i would say maybe more than eight inches in diameter
01:19:24remarkably as big as titanosaurs were their eggs were about the same size as ostrich eggs
01:19:35but some of them have incredibly thick shells
01:19:41as you could see this one for instance it's very very thick
01:19:46and it's about seven millimeter and this is virtually impossible to break
01:19:51so a chick would not be able to break that egg shell
01:19:56gerald thinks that the shells began this thick to shield the embryo inside from the geothermal chemicals
01:20:04but then these chemicals helped make it possible for the baby titanosaur to hatch
01:20:10the harsh chemical is eroding the eggshell from the outside to the inside
01:20:15thinning down the eggshell to probably 1.2 1.23 millimeter which is perfectly acceptable for the chick to break
01:20:25and for an incubating egg the choice of this site offered a major plus it had constant heat
01:20:34but baby titanosaurs had one big problem once hatched they were no bigger than domestic cats
01:20:48not great in a world teeming with hungry predators
01:20:54there's a premium on growth when you're on the menu and so they grow very rapidly to get to the point
01:20:59where they can be impervious to predation and going from the size of a cat to having five bones over
01:21:07six feet long means one serious rate of growth baby titanosaurs have an early burst of growth and that
01:21:15burst never stops they just keep growing as fast as they possibly can it should now be possible to pull
01:21:24all the clues together and build a picture of what these beasts looked like
01:21:31starting with scans of the bones ken lacovara works on a 3d digital model of dreadnoughtus
01:21:38the completeness of the skeleton means this model is far more accurate than for any previous titanosaur
01:21:46and this gives us an amazing opportunity we can take the model and scale it up
01:21:52to match the bones of argentinosaurus the largest titanosaur ever found
01:22:00only a handful of argentinosauruses bones have ever been discovered
01:22:05so this may be our best possible chance to fill in the blanks and see what the beast might have looked
01:22:11like just how big that is must be seen to be believed
01:22:17so one of the of the best way to have an idea how big this dinosaur could grow is to measure it
01:22:33so we are going to start with the tape
01:22:35using dreadnoughtus's skeleton as a guide lucio maps out how argentinosaurus may have stood on this ground
01:22:48its tail alone would be the length of titanoboa at 45 feet so this is the day
01:22:54adding its body takes lucio to 70 feet longer than megalodon
01:23:03so this is the tail and the body and now the neck
01:23:09the neck and head is another 60 feet giving a total length of 130 feet
01:23:14that's bigger than blue whale and paraceratherium put together
01:23:23all the pieces in place it's time to reveal the biggest beast ever to walk the earth
01:23:33meet argentinosaurus the biggest beast ever
01:23:37from the tail to the front of the head should be about 130 feet
01:23:54towering over 30 feet in the air without even lifting its head
01:24:12and with a neck like the arm of a crane the biggest known titanosaurs would have been a fearsome sight
01:24:24of an argentinosaurus standing over three stories tall a six feet person wouldn't even reach the knee
01:24:30of an argentinosaurus and 90 tons it likely weighed as much as 11 t-rexes
01:24:40and 130 feet from tail to mouth it was the length of the space shuttle orbiter
01:24:45titanosaurs were mega versions of long-necked long-tailed sauropods like diplodocus
01:24:59just their stomachs alone were likely the mass of an elephant
01:25:04and just one foot was big enough to crush 20 people
01:25:10so what was the secret to their mega size
01:25:15well an answer appears to lie with the one thing about titanosaur that isn't gargantuan
01:25:32its head
01:25:37a titanosaur like dreadnoughtus only had a head as big as that of a horse
01:25:41and that's because it didn't chew its food it just grabbed and swallowed
01:25:51the skull is basically a plant vacuum they don't have the ability to chew
01:25:57what that means is that a titanosaur had the capacity to consume over two tons of vegetation every day
01:26:05that's enough salad to feed 40 000 people
01:26:11dreadnoughtus could stand in one place with its massive body and not move that body and maybe spend
01:26:16an hour taking in tens of thousands of calories and then at the end of that take a few steps to the
01:26:22right and spend another hour or so clearing out another giant envelope of vegetation so by expending
01:26:28very few calories itself it takes in massive quantities of food
01:26:33this basic strategy made titanosaurs some of the most efficient eaters of all time
01:26:40and it allowed them to reach monster size
01:26:45and yet as big as they were experts are convinced that somewhere out there
01:26:50hidden in the rocks are even bigger specimens still to be uncovered
01:26:59the top 10 biggest beasts ever are giant creatures at the top of their evolutionary trees
01:27:07beasts that hunt kill walk swim and fly at sizes that dwarf all others
01:27:15between them they've mystified scientists broken the record books and colonized every continent on the planet
01:27:34you
Be the first to comment