Fangy Whatcheeria measured up to 6.5 feet (2 meters) long, and more than 300 million years ago, it was the apex predator in the sinkholes-turned-lakes of the American Midwest.
A fangy, 6-foot-long carnivore that haunted the lakes of what is now the American Midwest would have been a top predator in its freshwater ecosystem — a"T. rex of its time," according to scientists who studied the creature. And it grew up fast, new research finds.
"It would have made Whatcheeria the biggest thing in the lake: Go wherever you want, eat whoever you want," said Ben Otoo , a doctoral candidate at Chicago's Field Museum and the University of Chicago and one of the authors of a new study describing W. deltae published Monday in the journal Communications Biology .
That meant that Otoo and their colleagues had an opportunity to study how W. deltae grew. Early tetrapods like whatcheeriads were related to modern reptiles, amphibians and mammals but was in a different evolutionary lineage than the ancestor of those three groups. Modern-day birds and mammals tend to grow quickly in their youth and then stop growing, while reptiles tend to grow quickly at first and then continue growing, but more slowly.
"You have this animal that is racing to get to reproductive age to get to at least a decent size really quickly, because the best way to get yourself out of a predator's range of prey items is to get bigger," Otoo told Live Science.
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