Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren bog Obam Here. Some of our favorite animals used to be bigger. The giant beaver of the Pleistocene was the size of a black bear, and the Titana boa was a snake longer than a school bus and as big around as a tractor tire. There were hippo sized wombats, humongous sea scorpions, and birds of prey
the size of small jets. We still have some giants today, like the blue whale, but the largest organism currently living on earth is a fungus that stretches some two point four miles that's three point eight kilometers underground in Oregon.
But new research published in February in the journal Scientific Advances beefs up our picture a stupendamous geographicus, a giant freshwater turtle the size of a sensible four door sedan, which lived in the coastal wetlands of South America between five and ten million years ago before the Amazon River was formed. The study found that the turtle was one hundred times heavier than its closest modern relative and had the largest carapace or shell of any turtle ever known.
This whopping two thousand, five hundred pound goliath that's one thousand, one hundred and fifty kilos was also ready for battle. Some carapaces were tricked out with front facing horns sitting on both sides of their head, something scientists haven't seen before in prehistoric turtles. Marcello Sanchez, director of the Paleontological Institute and Museum at the University of Zurich, said in
a press release. The two shell types indicate that two sexes of Stupendibus existed, males with horns shells and females with hornless shells. Their shells were also covered in big scars and puncture marks, suggesting a few things about Stupendibus. These big brutes were fighters. The males and females did look different, and the males might have even fought each
other for access to the females. The horns could also have come in handy in fighting off another unspeakably hefty freshwater animal, the purse sourus, which was a cayman, a group of reptiles related to alligators that weighed nine point three tons and required ninety pounds or forty kilos of food. Today, just to get by all those dependumous geographicus was first described in the mid nineteen seventies. The current study has revised what we know about the size, anatomy, distribution, and
ecology of this turtle beast. Because the vast wetlands of prehistoric Venezuela and Colombia could support such a heavy duty team of reptiles, Stupendamous and Parasaurus probably duked it out until their ecosystem could no longer support either. Let this be a lesson to us all. Today's episode was written by Jocelyn Shields and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other really big topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is production of
iHeart Radio. For more podcasts to my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.