Leviathan: The Wolf of Whale Street

be talking about two whales. Leviathan for anyone who's not familiar shows up in the Book of Job. There's a lot of sort of poetic discussion of the Leviathans, such as can'st Thou'll draw out Leviathan within it with a hook or his tongue with a cord, which thou lettest down.

I think the Leviathan of the Book of Job is pretty clearly a fire breathing dragon, right well, but I could never I can never really get a way from the idea that it is some sort of hideous, gigantic sea monster at least a sea serpent, if not a whale of some sort But that's just that's just that's

just how I always looked to it. Well, I know a lot of times people try to explain some of the like the Leviathan and the Behemoth as being some kind of interpretation on existing animals, like, oh, maybe it was a whale, or maybe it was a saltwater crocodile or something. I don't know. Why not go with a fire breathing dragon. You got a fire breathing dragon on your plate, and you're trying to say no, no, no,

I don't want it. Well, I also have to say, for Behemoth, the other massive creature that's referenced in Job, I have pretty much always imagined some sort of Warhammer battle creature from from the Warhammer table tap game, some sort of big, like armored fiery demon monster. Yeah. But of course, the question of why the Leviathan and the Behemoth are invoked in the Book of Job goes sort of to the theology of the book, right, because they're in the scene where God shows up and God's like, Hey,

who's the boss? Is it? You know it's me because I can best even these top apex predators on the earth. Yeah, primordial sea monsters or land monsters or what have you. I can take them out, you can't. So I'm kind of running the whole show here. But it invokes the idea that there are some beast on earth so powerful, so so tip top of the pyramid, that it would take a god to best them. That's right. We when

we think of some of our top apex predators. Uh, this is what we often invoked, these ideas, right, because well, what do you think of when you think of an apex predator. Well, maybe your mind turns to a tiger, you know, tiger, tiger burning bright. You know, you can't help but romanticize the power of this creature. Or perhaps you think of the great white shark. I always think of the shark. Yeah, I mean, it's just so powerful and intimidating. It just it haunts our our our dreams.

Or perhaps you know, it's some visions of the mighty t rex, or perhaps the spina saurus if you want some prehistoric flavor, or really any of the various prehistoric land mammals that were particularly ferocious looking. So, what are the qualities that you associate with an apex predator, the

predator at the tip top of the food chain? Well, generally, you think it's gotta it's gotta be bigger than us, right, I mean, it doesn't actually have to be bigger than us, but it helps for us to pass that crown of Apex Predator over to it um it. It needs to be a ferocious predator obviously, and it needs to have no enemies except for maybe us if we're particularly crafty, and generally we are crafty enough to eradicate just about anything on this planet. Come on, we're the enemy of everything.

It's always got us. Yeah, Really, the only things that have a leg up in the battle against humans are the smaller creatures such as say the mosquito or various uh bacteria. Yeah, we're much more threatened to buy, say, armies of unstoppable parasites, than we are by that single, one powerful creature that that king or queen of the animal world. Yeah. And part of that has to do with the fragile nature of the the Apex throne, because that's the thing about about the mighty Apex Predator. It's

rule is tentative. There's there's not only loneliness at the top, but fragility and peril and ultimately who who knows how many great apex predators have perished throughout the evolutionary timeline, So many just massive toothy you know, flesh terrors have just ultimately perished, and many of them lost to us due to the rarity of their fossils. Yeah, that's exactly the problem, right, How many t rex fossils do you

expect to find? Well, actually, not that many, because there would you know, each time you go a step up the food chain, they're going to be fewer individuals, and often, especially with land dwelling animals, those fewer individuals are less likely to end up in a place where they're likely to get fossilized. So yeah, the top apex predators are underrepresented in the fossil record. Those are just the ones

that leave good fossil traces. I mean. One of the greatest s apex predators of all time, which we will be talking about in today's episode partially, is the great shark, the megalodon, which, because it's you know, this mostly cartilaginous fish, it doesn't have a solid skeleton like so many other animals do, so you you rarely even find all that extensive of a trace of it. You have to find its teeth and maybe little fragments of spinal pieces here

and there. You don't find whole intact megalodons, that's right. Meanwhile, of course, as we've discussed, the trilobytes are everywhere. Now when we think of giant, successful creatures that that prey with impunity and uh and have few, if any enemies in the natural world, we can't help but think of of the giant whales, the great whales such as the blue whale, the finback whale, the sperm whale, the right whale,

and the humpback whale. Man whales are such amazing creatures, and we are going to be focusing on one particular whale today, but also predatory whales in general. But especially when you get into the larger whales, there's really nothing on Earth like them. Oh yeah, I mean, for instance, the blue whale is not only the largest creature on Earth today, it is the largest creature known to have

ever existed ever. Yeah, like we're living the peak. You can't go back into prehistoric timelines and find a bigger blue whale, because the blue whale is the is the upper limit that as least as far as we've experienced it thus far as a planet. But that's not the only whale superlative that's right. For instance, the sperm whale

has the largest brain ever to have existed on Earth. Yeah, and that big brain is even there in the scientific name of the sperm whale, which is visitor macrocephalus macrocephalus, meaning big head. Now, I think there are a couple

of reasons for that. One of them is that it's got the biggest brain ever, but another one is that, of course it's got this giant, bloated forehead full of sperm, the spermacetic organ and the big melon that's used in echolocation, which we'll get to in a minute, but well, focus on that brain. An adult sperm whales brain is about eight thousand cubic centimeters on average, and if you compare that to the mean human brain, which is about cubic centimeters,

you'll see the difference. Like, this is a whale, and we we think of ourselves as like, wow, we got the best biggest brain on the you know, in the world. And of course brain size is not directly correlated to intelligence as we would imagine intelligence, but we think of ourselves as like the brain beast. We are the brain animal and sperm whales have a brain that is about

five times bigger than ours. Now, one thing you might wonder is, okay, you've got a blue whale that's much bigger than a sperm whale, but it's got a smaller brain than a sperm whale. Why is that? What would that be due to? Well, I would hypothesize that might have to do with the different ways these animals make a living. So whales belong to the biological order Cetacea, along with dolphins and porpoises, and from there, whales are

divided into two categories. You've got the billeen whales like the blue whale and the humpback, and then you've got the toothed whales like the orca or the killer whale, and the sperm whales. So you might chalk up this brain difference to the difference in the general trend of encephialization ratios for active or raptorial predators versus more passive feeders. Blue whales are filter feeders, I guess you could still

say their predators in a way. They prey on microscopic organisms small not microscopic, but small organisms like krill and copa pods. Swimming through these clouds of tiny crustaceans in the sea with their mouths open and their buffet feasters. Well, another way to think of it is that they're grazers, right, They're they're not I mean, they're not herbivores, they're not

eating plants. They're eating animals, but they're grazing on these vast patches of tiny animals that have no defensive capabilities or anything like that. They're just sort of drifting through their food. Yeah. Their whole approach is essentially, I'm just gonna float around eat as much as I possibly can, and I'm too big for anything to mess with me. Yeah, and it's kind of beautiful. Actually. There are videos of blue whales approaching these patches of of their food sources

like krill and stuff. So you'll see a large cloud of just differently colored water essentially, and the blue whales accelerate toward it, and right as they get toward there, they just pry their mouths open. It looks like a giant machine opening up to like accept a conveyor belt or something, which in a way it kind of is. And you've just got this massive flow in of these tiny organisms to get caught in its baleen plates the

mouth parts that catch the food so they can process it. Yeah, and I don't want to imply that there's not an intelligence and a beauty and a strategy to the feeding practices of the baling whales, because you do find examples of, say, humpback whales employing a sort of social strategy sometimes to

consume their prey. But sperm whales, on the other hand, are more active hunters, so they often i've deep to catch their prey, which is mostly giant squid, but they also hunt fish and octopus and larger crustaceans and sometimes even sharks. So all around the world I mentioned this

incephialization quotation. All around the world, it's a pretty common rule that predatory hunters didn't have larger brains than the prey they hunt, and this implies a great need for processing power, not necessarily what we would think of as intelligence and the kind of abstract human intelligence that we associate with. I don't know math problems or spatial problem

solving or i Q tests or anything. I think biologists tend to think that sperm whales likely need these big brains for perception, which is a kind of intelligence on its own right. Generally on land, a predator needs to have sharp senses to help it at like track and spy on prey, you know, to sense prey from far away, to stay on top of it, to be very aware of its surroundings. And on land this is very often

sight and smell. But spur whales, on the other hand, hunt mostly in this dark world of sound, hunting and mapping its surroundings by echolocation, where it uses these organs in its head to slap tissues together and create these clicks that they are then reflected out into the water, and it listens for the echoes of these clicks reflecting back to it off of anything that has a different

density than the water itself. So you have to if you're trying to imagine the inner life of a sperm whale, imagine yourself as a creature with a huge, powerful brain so highly tuned for sound that their internal picture of the world around them in a totally dark place is as rich and fine grained based on sound as our picture of the world is based on light. It's kind of impossible to put yourself in that headspace. But yeah, and and then I mean and also almost impossible for

us as humans to imagine that this creature. Uh, it's it's ancient ancestor with some sort of like essentially like a land wolf. Oh yeah, uh, I mean that. That's one of the craziest things is that you've always got to remember with whales, these creatures were not always in the water. They evolved from land dwelling mammals. So you might wonder, once you're one of the larger whales, do you really have any enemies to worry about it all?

Like if you are a sperm whale, if you're one of these powerful dark world predators that's you know, got the biggest brain in the entire animal kingdom, one of the biggest bodies in the entire animal kingdom. Is there any enemy out there for you in the wild? Not really? Probably only orcas really the worka or the killer whale.

But orcas are also fascinating whale predators. I was reading article in The Guardian by a marine biologist named Lawrence Smith about how orca's will sometimes attack great white sharks to eat their livers. You ever heard about this? Yeah, it's amazing. So apparently shark livers are just like Jack Pott marine nutrition. They're packed with more than ninety three per sent lipid's triascle glycerols. And Smith compares a great white shark liver to quote a deep fried Mars bar

with added vitamins. So it's packed with fat, rich, richly nutritious, but also lots of hard to come by nutrients in the ocean. So how do you get a great white sharks liver? Right? A great white shark that's a rough customer, right, Yeah, I mean that. Yeah, even as delightful as that liver is gonna be, you're gonna have to get through the great white and all those teeth to have a bite

of it. But apparently orca's don't have all that hard a time at it, because orca's are highly evolved, incredibly adept apex predators, and they can even prey on other apex predators like sharks. They are pack hunters. Yeah, and so the trick, Lauren Smith explains, and this fascinating article is that you give the shark the old flip flop.

So she writes a quote. During a n encounter off the Farallon Islands off the coast of San Francisco, a group of whale watchers witnessed an orca ramming into the side of a great white shark, momentarily stunning it and allowing the orca to flip it over and holding it in place ventral belly up for around fifteen minutes, after which the orca began consuming its prey, much to the surprise of the whale watchers on board. A similar incident was captured on film off Costa Rica, and this time

the orcas prey was a tiger shark. And it's not just sharks. Orcas have been observed doing the same to sting rays too, So what's going on here, Like, how come an orca can ram a shark, flip it upside down and then just eat its liver with impunity. Well, apparently sharks and rays have a nervous system security backdoor,

and it's known as tonic immobility. And this is a state of paralysis that alasmo bronx, which are sharks raisin skates, fall into when they get positioned upside down in the water. So you flip a shark belly up ventral side up, and it'll go catatonic and lose muscle control. Basically just goes into a coma and till it can get flipped around again. So what's the adaptive value in this? You've gotta wonder why a shark would have an exploit like this.

Nobody knows for sure, but it has been suggested this might somehow be used in mating practices. Okay, well that would that would make sense. That would be like the one time where it might be important for a shark, a highly aggressive predator, to be at least mildly incapacitated by it's uh, it's it's the mating shark. Yeah, But all this to illustrate how orcas are these amazing whale

predators themselves. So do they pose any threat to sperm whales? Well, pods of orca's will sometimes attempt to separate sperm whale calves from their mothers and eat them. Uh. And I actually did find one account from a paper published in Marine Mammal Science in two thousand and six about a large herd of orcas attacking a pod of nine sperm whales, including sperm whale adults and and preying on them. Yeah.

It's actually kind of a a horrifying scene. They describe where the sperm whales would circle up in this defensive posture where they kind of make a ring to defend themselves and try to fend off the killer whale attacks.

But the orcas were coming at them, and the in the it says that the orca has employed a wound and withdraw strategy, so they go in and try to injure the sperm whales and then back away, because of course the sperm whale is a very dangerous enemy, and you know, you could be seriously injured trying to prey

on one. So yeah, there was at least this one account I found of killer whales praying on adult sperm whales, But generally it seems like sperm whales, once they're adults, they're in good health, they're pretty much unassailable in the ocean. They don't really have natural enemies except for the occasional large herd attack of killer whales. And then of course this one other enemy, this one, and that would of course be a humans, because we are we are and

have been the main enemy of the great whales. Uh, certainly within the confines of human history, certainly in the last couple of hundred years, we are the apex hunters who hunted them relentlessly and drove several species to the brink of extinction. I mean you compare us to the orcas, who again are mainly going to be a threat to young whales, And there is certainly some there's some heartbreaking documentary footage out there of orcas hunting a mother and

her young whale across the seas. But humans, but are whaling practice to just prey on everything? Yeah? The counterpoint to that orca hunting is if you get to witness the protective practices of the adult, like the mother sperm whale, that's pretty amazing too. Yes, But it depends on the documented is some document if it's an Attenborough documentary, I don't necessarily trust that he is not going to break my heart with some terrifying predation. Well, there's a lot

of heartbreak in the ocean. Yeah, I mean, there's no denying it. But basically I end up approaching it this way because I'll watch a lot of documentaries with my son and it's it's gotten to the point where it's kind of a toss up, like how he's gonna respond to the predation Because used to like any predation, especially there's dramatic music. He would get a little upset about.

But but now, at almost six years old, he's surprisingly chill with some grotesque levels of pre date predation, Like it'll be three leopard cubs feasting on a corpse and I'll come in and I'll I'll walk over and I'll see this, and we're like, are you Are you okay with this, buddy, And he says, he says, oh, yeah, they're brothers. They're hungry. That's fine, Robert. I think you've just come up with a great children's show, The Hungry Brothers. It's it's all about how you frame it right now.

One of the questions that the flip flop of all this is do sperm whales ever attack humans? This is something that has been a point of controversy, though there are definitely reports, especially reports from the nineteenth century, of for example, sperm whales ramming ships. Now, it's hard to tell if these accounts are accurate, but sailors from like

Simpkins ships in the nineteenth century did report it sometimes. Yes, what happened is a sperm whale rammed our ship until we sank it, like attacked us with the intent to

kill us. And you know, it's hard to imagine if that's even true to begin with, It's hard to imagine what's going on in the mind of the sperm whale, though I have also read comments from sub marine biologists too think, well, yeah, it's possible that, for example, a sperm whale might ram a ship if it perceived that ship as a threat, which a sperm whale could have good reasons to do, especially in the nineteenth century with

horrible whaling practices. I mean, if you read about some of the whaling practices that were in place, then it's worse than any Attenborough documentary. It's it's just the most sadistic kind of methods. One I read about was where the whalers would kidnap a calf whale, injure it, and then keep it they're injured, waiting for the parents to come and try to rescue it, at which point they'd

harpoon the parents. Yeah, I mean, I mean, certainly the individuals participating this at the time, you do have to re eyes. Yeah, they were, they were participating in an in an industry, and this probably not everyone's first choice.

It's true, I mean, I shouldn't judge too much. I mean, and in some cases this is also a cultural practice that I I shouldn't pass too much judgment on that, but but certainly the whaling industry, Yeah, but certainly the whaling industry did become such an industry that it is. It is difficult, if not impossible, to look back on

it now and not feel a little sick about it. Like, uh, when I was a kid in Newfoundland, Canada for a while, I remember we would uh, at least on one occasion, we we walked through an abandoned uh whaling port uh. And it was it was even then when I only like really kind of partially understood everything, it was kind of haunting because you would find these like whale vertebrae, and then there would be these big rusted harpoons, like the blunt harpoons, and then the as well as some

of the pointed ones as well. And these were like the later day ones, the ones that would have been uh, you know, launched off of a canon I understand, not

the the romantic moby Dick era harpoons. I feel like there's another way in which whaling sort of violates our hunting intuitions, which is, I mean a lot of people would feel terrible about any kind of killing of an animal, But somehow there's an intuition that killing an animal to harvest its meat for food is kind of different than like killing an animal to melt it down and render it's fat for industrial purposes, which is a lot of

what was going on with lamps, etcetera. Yeah, Now, as you mentioned earlier, uh, a lot of these stories of like whales ramming ships, We're not completely sure what happened. There's a there are there's a lot of legend that that rises up surrounding the activity of whales during the height of the whaling industry. Uh. And then there of course whole myths of sperm whales, in particular swallowing humans whole.

Is that true? Did that really happen? Uh? So I've looked into this in the into the in the past stuff to put your mind. Actually did an episode on this way back in the day. Uh, and it seems

like it probably did not happen. It's it's a it's an inviting idea because sperm whales, as we already mentioned, they do feed by suction, some chewing, but oftentimes they're just sucking down something whole and in fact, in nive a whole a whole, like un chewed four hundred and five pound giant squid was recovered from the belly of a sperm whale. Uh and uh in the sperm whale doesn't even have a tongue, you know, to to prevent

just this absolute and inhalation of tissue. Now as now, the question, of course is has a sperm whale ever sucked down a human being which would which is also probably an inviting idea because of the the myth of Jonah and the Whale, or our stories like Pinocchio and the Belly of a Whale, or even modern retellings like the Whaler's Revenge Song by the Decembrants. Uh. There's actually a wonderful article that came out in Salon back in by author of Ben Shattuck, and he explored the question

at the new Bedford Whaling Museum Search Library. So he was going through all these various accounts of of whale related deaths frequently caused by a whale on boat action and ramming a boat and yeah, or just also thrashing, you know, like the flute could hit the boat. I mean, these are massive creatures and in their struggle to survive, Yeah, they could do some serious damage to a boat. Well, that's the thing to remember. If they want to kill us,

of course they could. The question is like, would that be uh, something that would occur to them to do? Right, So Shattuck says, quote, I'd like to believe in swallowings, but it's tough. There's there is no air in the stomach, for one, there are acids, and if we are talking about sperm whales, which are most of the which we are most of the time, there is the deadly passage through the thirty foot jaws and those teeth. So, uh, this is a wonderful article and I'm not gonna attempt

to summarize it all here. He gets into a number of different angles and it really gets into the heart of this kind of like voar fetish, this idea that we kind of like the idea of being consumed whole by another organism because it is like a return to the womb. How weird. Yeah. So he discusses a few different stories, different accounts of people being dragged and released

by whales, h maulled by whales. There's one particular story, the case of Edmund Gardner, where there's actually a photograph of this individual years later and you can still see his mangled hand because he lost some fingers uh, to the mouth of a sperm whale. There are, ultimately in the new Bedford Whale Museum thousands of accounts of people being chewed on by whales, but there's not a single one of someone being swallowed shadock. However, not to disappoint

he does discuss. He does discuss what it would be like to be eaten by a sperm whale. That is my kind of exploration. Yea. Now we we did the what it would be like to get eaten by a giant spider. We could do a whole episode on what would be like to get eating by a giant whale? Yeah. Yeah. He goes into it in depth in the article, but basically it would go down like this. You'd be sort of chewed on or at least gnashed on those eight

inch teeth. You get sucked down the throat into a dark, airless place, just water and acid, and then you'd slide into the first stomach or holding bag for twenty four hours,

perhaps surrounded. He has this beautiful description of the possible bioluminescent squid that would be down there with you lighting it up for a little bit, and but then the acid would break you down and you pass through three smaller s shaped stomachs, liquidized and then reduced a whale excrement with some possible bits of bones stuck in there, and that would be your journey, pooped out in a

cloud of beaks. Yes, yeah, because that being the The side fact here is that, of course the beaks of giant squid are not digested either, and they end up

just passing through rest and beaks. Okay, but today we want to look at these magnificent giant predators, the sperm whales and their predatory tooth oil relatives, and specifically to follow their ancestors back through history millions of years, back to the time of something that seems to me like maybe the ultimate predator, the best apex predator I've ever read about, the Leviathan, and I think we should tell the story of this creature when we come back from

a break than alright, we're back. So to be clear, we've known about prehistoric whales in general for quite a while now, and if you've ever spent much time in a in a in a paleontology museum or book, then you've seen these creatures often depicted as sort of sort of skexy faced whales. You know, now you're not pronouncing sexy in a funny way. You're saying like skexies, like in the Dark Crystal, the skexies of the Dark Crystal, where they kind of like long, slender snouted and very

toothy looking vulture face. Yeah, kind of vulture faced whales. That that's how paleo artists tended to pick them. And the prime example here would be basil Osaurus. Like the name, yeah, well it's name is misleading because it means king lizard. Well, but it's not a lizard. But due to the rules of naming, attempts to name it other things have not to work. So we're stuck with Basilosaurus. Okay, tell me

about basil o Saurus. Okay. So this was a genus of prehistoric cetaceans from the late EO scene that's forty to thirty five million years ago, and according to the Smithsonian, they probably reached links of forty to sixty five ft that's twelve to twenty meters roughly. Uh. Though the nine Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals that's a book that I grew up with and continue to like check out with my son because it has all these wonderful illustrations.

That book boasted a length of up to eighty two ft or twenty five ms. I can tell they're stretching it right now. But if you want to talk about stretching it, you go back to eighteen forty five Albert Coke, who was an avid fossil collector, showman and proprietor of the St. Louis Museum. He claimed that the creature would have measured a hundred and fourteen feet long or thirty five meters, And yeah, he was a bit of a showman, and but this drew skepticism from the scientific community. Even

at the time. They were like, I don't know, that sounds a bit big. I mean there's always this inflationary tendency, right, you want to make the thing as big as possible. Yeah, you're trying to sell tickets. Yeah, So this creature would have been an early precursor to the great toothed whales to follow, sharing a similar diet, but without the larger cranium size or the the evolved social behavior. And this brings us to the Leviathan, Right, the Leviathan. I'm so

excited about the Leviathan. So I want to tell a fossil discovery story and give you the setting. So it was November two eight and there were a team of fossil hunters. They were exploring the desert of the Pisco Eca area of Peru. And this is a part of a long strip of desert that runs north south along the western coast of South America west of the Andes.

So if you picture South America, you've got the west coast, and then there's usually desert regions stretching to the mountains of the Andes, and then have got you know, more lush rainforest or other types of ecoregions going east of the Andes. And the Pisco ecoregion is south of the capital city of Lima and Peru, but north of the Nascar region, which is known for its amazing ancient geoglyphs carved in the earth. If you've never seen the Nasca geoglyphs,

by the way, you should look them up. They're great. So there's a two thousand ten New York Times article about this area in general, and though the Times focuses on one region, in this desert known as the oku Kahe Desert. So you have to picture this apocalyptically dry, dusty expanse often totally desolate, very windy, stretching to the west facing side of the Andes, and the winds here kick up dust devils and they steadily erode these old,

jagged rocks. To get a sense of it from a local, the Times article quotes uh someone named Yolanda Gutierrez, who's a worker who travels into this region to harvest seaweed from along the coast in the desert, and Gautierrez says, quote, this desert is horrible. The only things a person sees are dirt and rocks and bones. But what if you're looking for bones, well then then I'm guessing you're in

for a treat. Yeah. So the French paleontologists Christian de Muizon says that the desert along the coast of Peru contains what is probably quote the richest spot in the world for fossil marine mammals. And this New York Times article is interesting. It points out that this area is so rich in fossils, especially marine fossils, that local merchants in Eca and other New yorby nearby towns self fossilized shark teeth the size of a man's hand for sixty two hundred dollars. Now, the size of a of a

man's hand. That's not a great white tooth, that's something else. Yeah, that's that's getting into like Megalodon territory. We're talking to the beasts of old right. So, according to Peru's Ministry of Culture's Office of Recovery, in two thousand ten alone, there were more than two thousand, two hundred seizures of illegally obtained fossils that people were trying to smuggle out of the country free or sell on the black market. So this is fossil city, but especially for marine fossils.

So there are many officially recognized fossil discoveries from the area, including the teeth of the megalodon, which is this giant prehistoric shark we've been mentioning that could grow eighteen meters or sixty feet long. A two thousand eight study in the Journal of Zoology by lead author Stephen Rowe created a model that predicted this animal could have had a bite force of more than a hundred and eighty thousand Newton's which is about forty thousand pounds or about eighteen

thousand kilograms of bite pressure. And this has been described as strong enough to crush a car. Yes, Now, to put that in perspective with others species, the black piranha three twenty newtonts of force, the largest saltwater crocs alive today sixteen thousand, four hundred fourteen newtons, the largest great white sharks alive today eighteen thousand, two hundred and sixteen newtonts humans and seventeen But so this is ten times stronger bite force than a great white shark, and a

great white shark has amazingly strong bite force. So the megalodon was was a beast. It could buy I mean, it could bite your dreams in half. They could bite a chunk out of a mountain. This this thing was the beast of beasts and a kind of creepy factor. Remember is that the megalodon existed until it seems like about two and a half million years ago. That feels too close, right it does. What if you found out Toranosaurus rex had existed until around the same time as

our australiapithecen ancestors. Yeah, you would be more inclined to think, well, I might run into one. And even though to be clear, there are no megalodon left in the sea, uh, it does feel a little too close. It makes you a little more inclined to think, well, there, maybe there could be especially of the right sort of sci fi novel

scenario where met yea. So, this western desert in Peru is a rich spot for ancient marine fossils because this desert was once a sea floor which has been pushed up to become dry land by the tectonic activity that created the andes the mountains there. So when you walk through this desert there are these little hills and rocky formations that very often contain fossilized creatures that swam the

sea millions of years ago. And so, according to Nature News in two thousand eight, a member of this team of researchers I mentioned named class Post, a Dutch researcher who worked at the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, came across a rocky outcropping with a monstrous toothy figure embedded

within it. It was a jaw fragment about as long as an adult human, with these unbelievable teeth teeth like artillery shells, and it was what appeared to be the fossilized skull of a giant whale that it was positioned inside.

As it was inside the rock, the skull was broken and upside down, and once the fossil was excavated and prepared in Lima, the researchers, including Christian de muizon Own who had quoted a minute ago and Olivia Lambert and others, published their findings in Nature in two thousand and ten. This was no ordinary sperm whale. They figured out that they had discovered a new genus and species of extinct predatory whale related to sperm whales, and they named it

Leviathan Melville. Uh. So that's wonderful because they're they're drawing on the biblical tale of of Leviathan, and then they're also paying homage to uh to Moby Dick, right, And so they they cited Moby Dick is the reason for calling it that more, even more so than pointing to the Bible, because in Moby Dick Melville very often refers

to the great sperm whale as the Leviathan, right. And so here we have like the ultimate sperm whale like the the prehistoric sperm whale, a sperm whale so gigantic that it may have eaten whales. Yeah, and we'll get to that in a minute. And it's not I want to emphasize that it's not necessarily its size, because the sperm whales of today are are very large. It is something more about the mouth and the teeth and the face that we'll get into that explains what exactly this

creature was. So their Nature paper was published under the title quote the Giant Bite of a new raptorial sperm Whale from the Miocene epoch of Peru, and the authors identified the specimen as having lived about twelve to thirteen million years ago, which would have put it in the

Middle Miocene. Its head was three meters long or about ten feet, and extrapolating from this, the team concluded that the animal's body length was at least thirteen point five meters or forty five ft and up to seventeen point five meters are almost sixty feet, putting it in the sperm whale or megalodon size category. And these teeth, unlike modern sperm whales, which just have the fully developed teeth on their lower jaws. Leviathan Melville had interlocking teeth on

its upper and lower jaws. And if you take one of these teeth and measure it, it is like a too leader soda bottle almost. I mean, it is huge. You'll find it's thirty six centimeters long or over fourteen inches long, and twelve centimeters are almost five inches in diameter. Insanely big teeth. These are, in the words of Chris jondmuizone, the biggest tetrapod bite ever discovered. Now you have to add that nobody yet has has crunched the numbers on

exactly how many newtonts this particular bite would pack. But Lambert in particular estimates that it that it would was probably either on par with Megalodon or perhaps exceeded Megalodon's bite, But it remains an open question. But bigger teeth than the megalodon, right, Yeah, I mean these teeth are hilarious if you look at them, and if you try to imagine them in situation as they would have been in the mouth and this mouth is coming at you open,

it's the most terrifying thing you can think of. They're almost too big for us to even uh process as teeth, they're they're they're like giants to lagtites and still lagmites. You know. Yeah, they look like sharp ended dinosaur eggs. They're just gigantic. So what was the life and setting of this massive ancient hunter, the Leviathan, the killer whale of killer whales? How did it live? Well? First of all, twelve million years ago, predatory toothed whales were much more

numerous than they are today today. When you think of predatory toothed whales, you've got things like the orcas, the killer whales, and you've got the sperm whales that dive deep into the darkness and mostly prey on squid by this suction action. But something to keep in mind is that not all of the toothed whales today are as we've been pointing out, biters. Modern sperm whales they do this suction thing, they suck the squid in and swallow it.

But the Leviathan, based on its jaw and its teeth, has the paleontol just looking at it have said, oh, yeah, this thing was definitely a biter. It was a raptorial predator that would swim up and it would bite something. And by looking at an animal's mouth parts, you can be you often tell what kind of stuff it would have been biting, right, Yeah, because, as we've said before, nature is a cheap skate. It's not going to keep teeth around for no reason. If the teeth are there,

they're serving a purpose. Yeah, if you're eating cucumber sandwiches, you don't need thirty six centimeter long teeth and and a bite force on the scale of the megalodon. So because of the shape, size and wear pattern on the teeth and the skull, the authors of the study believe that Leviathan did not prey on smaller, softer prey like squid, but was hunting large prey with tough skeletons and hard

body parts. That prey was very likely other whales, specifically mid sized billen whales like likely between about seven and ten meters long, meaning the prey animals of this whale were about twenty three to thirty three feet. This is the whale Killer Whale, the Wolf of Whale Street. I love that. We're gonna have to go that with that

for the title. Now in the episode, alright, know, um, at this point, I should I should, I should really drive home the reign of the basil Saurus that we discussed earlier was ancient history by the time Leviathan came to rule the seas, and as as far as we know it, it pretty much ruled the seas. It was it was pretty much the top predator of the ocean. We don't know of anything else out there to compete

with it, except maybe the megalodon. That's right. The only known creature from this time frame that would have rivaled it would have been Megalodon. But it's unknown of these two species ever actually competed against each other or you know, or certainly had any kind of like a throw down

epic sea monster battle. You know, I have to say it's it's it's interesting that some theorize that competition and threats from the likes of Megalada Megalodon may have led to the development of pack hunting behavior and toothed whales such as the orca, and to the gigantic size of Leviathan. And of course it's also argued that Leviathan's hunger may have led to an increase in size among the baleen whales.

You know, get big enough to where you're no longer uh gonna be as as easy of of a prey species for the apex predator, and this may have led to the humpbacks and fin backs and the great blue whales that we know today. I do have to add, though, that more fossil evidence is needed to fully support uh

this notion. Though that's an interesting concept. I hadn't heard that, but uh, that kind of makes sense that they would evolve to become larger in order to better defend themselves against these horrible ancient predators or yeah, or it just becomes a you think about what what sort of animals is the apex predator preying on? You know, what size

is what? What you know particular strains of the genome are falling to it, and then how is that affecting uh, the the the the the surviving sizes among the species. I mean, as an animal keeps getting bigger and stronger than you, it's harder and harder to prey on it rightly. And even an apex predator is not going to say, yeah, I feel like a challenge. I'm gonna go after this big boy here, and no, you're gonna go after what what is easiest? You know, of course they don't want challenges.

I mean again, the animal nature is a cheap skate, and animals are cheap skates that they don't want to take unnecessary risks. I mean this goes back to this question you brought up. Everybody always wants to know once they find out about Leviathan Melville did the did the Leviathan and the Megalodon fight? Who would have won in

a fight? And I am, of course not above a little bit of fantasy monster showdown thinking myself, but from what I've read, there's probably not a good reason to think that the adults of these species would have fought one another. They might have, like tried to prey on the young of the other species, but once they're adults in good health, these are both very large and very powerful predators, and for either one to start some trouble would have been a risky move, right. Remember, actual fighting

is rarer than you probably imagine. In the wild. Animals don't like getting hurt, and when they pick on something their own size and strength or bigger, they're likely to get hurt. And animals are much more likely to go after smaller, weaker prey that you know when you see predators attacking a herd of antelope or something like that. They're very often trying to get the young, or trying to get a sick, weakened animal, not to get a strong animal in its prime that might kick him in

the face. Though I do hear that megalodon liver is just just delicious. Well, I want to come back to that in a minute. So, though Olivia Lambert has suggested that these species uh may have tried to pick off one another's young, I haven't come across any evidence that there's there. There are fossil records of them fighting one another as adults, and it doesn't seem like it would have made a lot of sense for them to do that.

Only humans really are stupid enough to to to go after the impossible dream, you know, And we we and we idolize it too. We we look at someone like say Werner Herzog and we say, you know, in his decision, I'm going to I want to film the movie about about about dragging a boat over a mountain, and we're going to actually drag a boat over a mountain to do it. Megalodon is not going to do that neither. That's human folly. So here's another curious observation. We talked

earlier about the gigantic foreheads of sperm whales. These big heads contain what's known as the spermaceti organ, right, which is a collection of these chambers holding oily waxy material. And it's not known for sure exactly what this is for, but there are a couple of main hypotheses that have been put put forward over the years to explain it. The first that it has been used in echolocation, and from what I understand, I think this is the favorite

hypothesis now. But a second that has been put forward is that the spermaceti organ was an aid in regulating buoyancy to help the whale in in managing its deep dives. So Leviathan also appears to have had a spermaceti organ

in its head. But if there's any truth to the second hypothesis, you might wonder why a whale like Leviathan would need something like that, right, Because the hypothesis of Leviathan's life is that it didn't need to go down and deep dive for squid, that it was a shallow feeder,

was a shallow hunter. These other predatory whales, now, one kind of crazy hypothesis to explain what's going on here has been leveled at this from the University of Utah evolutionary morphologist David Carrier, who we've mentioned on the show before. I think was he the fist punch theory guy. Oh

my goodness, I think he was. Yeah. So he said, quote spermaceti organs could be used as battering rams to injure opponents during contests over females or I think he also mentions it could have been used to incapacity to mobilize prey. So Carrier sites the fact that, as we mentioned earlier, people have told these stories from the nineteenth century that their boats were sunk after being rammed by

sperm whales. So it's being imagined for this ancient predator here, the giant toothy whale, the biter Leviathan, is that you've got a one to punch. The world's largest marine predator speeds out of the darkness, smashes into you at full speed, knocks you senseless, and then just bites you in half with teeth the size of two leader soda bottles to

surge up from the depths. I like it. Now. Who knows if this is correct, but there's another way actually in which this ramming theory does seem kind of plausible to me, because the leviathan is more often cited as a relative of the sperm whale due to its mouth structure and possible hunting patterns. But it might be helpful to imagine what would happen if you basically had a gigantic orca a killer whale the size of a sperm whale. Remember the story from earlier about how Orca's got the

shark liver. That's right, They needed to hit him in the belly, right, So the orca would ram the shark to stun it and immobilize it, then flip the shark on its back, which would send it into this this catatonic state, the tonic immobility, where it would go into a go into a frozen paralysis, and then the orca could dine on its liver at its leisure. And so now I'm imagining this exact thing, but instead of an orca in a great white, it's a leviathan and a

megalodon twelve million years ago. Because one there's certainly as sort of a prey hacking tactic involved with with using it against sharks Uh, it would probably work pretty well. It's a whale too, a monster like this just ramming into its prey. Now, of course that this is just a hypothetical scenario I'm imagining. Once again, there is no direct evidence I'm aware of that the Leviathan ever preyed

on adult Megalodon. But it's is fun to imagine, isn't it. Yeah, we can't help but imagine these uh, these these these ancient battles that I just read an entire book to my son where each each page, each spread, was one dinosaur against one prehistoric beast and you had to compare stats to see which one would win. And we did spend a lot of a lot of time explaining, well, these two would never actually battle, you know, these they would have never met, and if they had, why would

they have messed with each other? But we still love a good, good tear down fight. Well, if it came down to it, the Megalodon is no sloush. But one thing you got to remember, the Leviathan's got bigger teeth and a bigger brain. Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna have to show my mammalian bias and and root for the Leviathan no matter what like, I just feel more more of a kinship to the Leviathan. Yeah, you've got to

That shark's got black eyes like a doll's eyes. All right, Well, on that note, we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we're gonna we're gonna get to another press in question. Where did all these monsters go? Thank? Alright, we're back, So Robert, I want to come back to this thing we discussed at the beginning about the apex predator and how it seems in our mind versus how

it is in reality. Because apex predators seem so individually powerful the tiger, the great white shark, or even the ancient megalodon or the Leviathan, it's difficult for us to imagine how a beast this powerful would disappear, whatever, have any kind of vulnerability, or go extinct, Like what could wipe them out, what could pose a challenge to them?

They were top of the pops, right, But while individually strong, ape ex predators are just as vulnerable to extinction as any other species, and in many cases actually much more so. That's right, because your species may become king whale, but it doesn't mean that it's going you're going to remain king whale, because what will happen to thy prey or great great eater? Will you eat them all and in

doing so steal your own extinction with theirs? Or will you eat the ones that you can easily catch, and in doing so encouraged traits in your prey that will one day outwit you, or encourage specificity and laziness in yourself. That's right, Yeah, you you become dependent on this one thing. You become great at this one type of predation. So you eat only the small uh, and so the species grows larger with time because larger specimens are more likely

to evade your bite. Meanwhile, those who compete with you for your prey adapt with time as well, perhaps growing larger or craftier. The smaller predators become pack hunters, perhaps using their tactics against you in your own precious young again, a strategy employed by varieties of Orca to this day. And there is a lot of evidence that social behaviors tend to win out over time. Yeah. So I have a I have a fun example I'm going to throw out here. Uh So I just ask everyone to roll

with me on this. But let's consider Jason vorhees as as a sort of apex predator. Okay, is he more the Megalodon or the Leviathan. He's maybe more Megalodon. I think more Megalodon. He has more of that like shark brain going on. I think so. For whatever silly reason, he's he's very adapt at praying on promiscuous or otherwise morally suspect teenagers. Right. He hears that beer can cracking from far away, and he's on the march. But it's the solid moral characters who prove difficult prey as well

as the of course psychically potent teenagers as well. Okay, so you're invoking the rules of horror and slasher movies, which are that the good kids tend to be the only ones who can out with the killer. Right, But then the added rule for Jason, if there's a kid with psychic powers, that one's going to be difficult prey as well. Well, the kids with psychic powers tends to

be the good kid. True. So, over time, perhaps vorhes predatory habits advanced the genetic tendency of moral and psychic prey until his natural habitat of Crystal Lake is just overflowing with psychic virgin honor students that best in every turn, or maybe he's just so good at his job that slashers with less robust franchises, like say leather Face, they have to become more social or intelligent in order to earn their kills. So Leatherface has a whole family helping him.

Exactly it kind of it kind of writes itself, doesn't it. Robert, You've taken this into profound territory. Now, speaking of species becoming smarter uh and and uh and having better brains that that are social abilities to compete. We touched on the encephalization quotation earlier. That's the e Q and this is UH to be clear, the the actual brain size

of a creature versus what would be expected on mass alone. Now, often this is taken as a measure of the intelligence of an animal, and there is there does appear to be some correlation, but it's not a totally direct correlation. There outliers with bigger or smaller brains relative to their bodies that don't seem to be totally in line with

how intelligent we think they are. So the pack hunting orcas they boast a two point five Now that's small compared to the human seven or the bottlenose dolphins four, but it rises above the baileeen whales one. They boast the processing powers and necessary to hunt as a social unit. Well, yeah, I mean the billeen whales. They probably don't need much more of a brain than like a grazing herbivore would need. Now, it's also possible that environmental factors contributed to the downfall

of the leviathan. A cooling climate during the late Neo scene around ten millions to eleven million years ago, giant active predators simply wouldn't be able to function anymore. Meanwhile, smaller predators could have fared better, including sperm whales that depended on deep sea prey like the giant squid. Now why would they do better, Well, because you have the deep, dark, cold ocean. This is more of a stable environment, less vulnerable to climate change. So so there's climate change on

the surface that's affecting what prayer available. But you know, you can always go down into the dark world to get you some squid, right the squid. The squid remain constant down there. So those that can dive down and and and eat that meal, they have stability that the way leaders are just not going to have. Yeah, it's fascinating to contemplate what happens to these powerful creatures like

the Mega Ladon and the Leviathan. Uh. You know, we we've got these different theories about what happened to them, but ultimately a lot of things could have happened to them. Because even though the individual aprex apex predator is strong, the apex predator as a species depends on an awful lot going right. In order for it to survive, it has to have access to its prey. If the prey thins out, dies off, or migrates somewhere else, the apex

predator can starve. Apex predators also tend to have low reproduction rates and large bodies with powerful brains and muscles, which need lots and lots of food to grow and sustain. The apex predator business, you might say, in some ways, is a very successful one, but it's also a high initial investment organism that requires a lot of incoming cash flow in the sense of a business. Right. If you can't keep the flow of resources streaming to it, it

quite quickly gets into desperate circumstances. It can't feed itself, can't reproduce and raise healthy young, or in some cases might even turn to cannibalism, which is not good for a species in the long run. The genetic economics of cannibalism do not pay off. Now, some sort of apex predators have managed to survive many ecological crisises or crises and just keep going right, like sharks are a good example.

The megalodon isn't still around, but sharks in general have been pretty top of the food chain predators for more than four hundred million years. But of course, the megalodon is still extinct and the deep diving squid sucking sperm whale still exists, but the leviathan is now extinct. So where do these giant apex predators come from in the first place? That might kind of help us explain where

they go. Well, one thing is that there's this informal principle in evolutionary biology known as Copes rule, named after an American paleontologist named Edward Drinker Cope. Where where are all the drinkers today? I don't know. I don't run across that name. Very cops real states that over geological time, a lineage of related animals will tend to increase in body size. And this is an informal rule because it doesn't always hold at every taxonomic level or every type

of organism, but it is very often true. It's true on average. Just as one example, in February, a study published in Science found that if you track the size of marine animals on average over the past five hundred and forty two million years, they have increased a hundred and fiftyfold in size. So why does this appear to happen? Well, I did find an interesting study on that. So there was a study in the American Naturalist in called ecological

specialization in Fossil Mammals explains copes rule. And what this study think that what they think they find is that one possible way of explaining copes rule is that evolution favors animals with bigger bodies, like if you're bigger, you're stronger and harder to kill. Right, But the authors of the study looked at evidence from five hundred and fifty four extinct mammals over the past sixty million years, and they found a couple of interesting trends that got more

specific than that. It's not just that bigger bodies are adaptive or that they're always better. These authors found that the increase in body size was correlated with quote increasing ecological specialization, meaning you're zeroing in on one more and more unique way of surviving in the ecology around you, with maybe a particular prey to type, or a particular hunting strategy or particular type of habitat that you're finally

adapted to. As you get really good at one thing, on average, animals tend to get bigger, so the increase in body size was linked to that, But it was also linked to another interesting thing, periods of global cooling. And this tends to go in accordance with another informal biological principle known as Bergman's rule, which says that the colder a climate you live in, the more your body

mass increases. So that's interesting. These bigger bodies tend to correlate with the world getting colder and with animals that tend to get more and more specialized to become less and less of a generalist survivor. But there's a downside that comes with this, right, increased extinction risk when averaged over time. In other words, heavy lies the crown so you want to be the king, the queen, the mob boss,

the CEO. If you focus really hard on a very particular strategy for success, you might be able to make it. But you will be wearing a target on your back the whole time. Everybody wants to take you down. And in a metaphorical way, the same is true for a species. If you want to be the master of the sea, the megalodon, the leviathan, the king or the queen of the water, you will get crushed when your main food

source disappears. It is hard to be a generalist when you're that big and that powerful and on the top of the pyramid. Wow. You know, I'm tempted to make some comparison here between between the diets of apex predators such as this and uh humanities dependency on fossil fuels, which of course ties in rather nicely with the history of whaling as well the harvesting of these creatures for

industrial purposes. You know, when you but when you become dependent upon this one thing, what happens when that that source shrivels up? Yeah, And of course this isn't gonna be this true in the same way about all apex predators are all larger animals, right. This is something that appears to based on this study, be true on a ridge. So there are definitely going to be some predators that are more resilient and I think in most cases going

to be more of a generalist survivalist than others. But the ones where their increase in in size and food chain dominance correlates to this very direct specialization in a certain way of making a living, very often that does make you vulnerable. You lose your individualism as a survivor. Yeah. Like one of the exceptions that comes to mind is of course the bear, particularly the larger bear species that are certainly large and ferocious and have no natural enemies

be beyond man. Oh, think of the polar bear. Polar bear, very powerful apex predator actually though it has a it has a pretty particular ecological niche though um and when say climate change happens, that does not work out well at all for the polar bear. Right. But meanwhile, you also look at something like a black bear which will eat just about anything, or grizzly grizzly bears that that go through through sort of varying stages of of dietary consumption.

But but it's largely based on what is available. Yeah, exactly, more generalist and thus a little bit more resilient, a little bit harder to go extinct. Yeah. Of course, then you have the panda bear, which is which is certainly a specialist in its own right, and is therefore in

a kind of fragile place as well. It's true if you're bamboo, you know, the panda bear is the most terrifying predator of all, you know, I'm always I'm always astounded when I remember that the cave bear was probably a herbivore, you know, the ferocious bear that is depicted battling, Yeah, that early man. Yeah, this would have been This would have been a nerbivore. This would would not have been out there actively trying to eat humans. That's fascinating. I

didn't know that. Yeah, we could do a whole another episode on bears basically, and there's plenty of content to discuss there. Well, I don't know. I mean, I I've really enjoyed this look at apex predators because it's so counterintuitive to think of them as so evolutionarily fragile. Yeah. Yet again, not in every case, but so many of them yeah, we tend to think of that if if you're the top predator, then you were there the king

of the hill. You were in a privileged position and you're not susceptible to these various extinction threat threats, but you were still vulnerable. Last thing I want to encourage today, look up the picture of the Leviathan's teeth. Yes, oh and sorry, I should say one more thing about its name. They had to you know, again, earlier today we mentioned something about the weirdness of taxonomy. Yeah, this was with the basil Osaurus. That means that that means king lizard,

even though it is a whale. But we can't change it because that was the first name, the Leviathan whale. They had to change the spelling because there I think there was already some other organism that had the Leviathan genus as spelled in English Leviathan, so they changed it, I think to the Hebrew spelling of Leviathan. So now

would be like Leviaton has y in it, right. Yeah. Yeah, It's like if you were going to name your band Leviathan and then you realize there was already a Leviathan, so you just you just add some funny characters in there, and you're good to go to to do a weird spelling on it, all right, So, so there you have it. If you would like to reach out to us about this episode discuss some ancient apex predators, then we encourage you to do so. You can find us on social media.

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