[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to freaky fauna Friday, where every Friday we take a little time and explore some of the freaks of nature from around the planet.
[SPEAKER_01]: We cherish so deeply.
[SPEAKER_01]: So please jump aboard and let's explore the wilds together.
[SPEAKER_02]: I am the great and peaceful mystery and there's no jaggy joining me tonight.
[SPEAKER_02]: obligations that came up.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'll be taking this one solo, which is a little rough, because while I love this animal, I cannot pronounce its name.
[SPEAKER_02]: It very well.
[SPEAKER_02]: So today, we're going to talk about an extinct fish called Dunkle, all OSTS.
[SPEAKER_02]: Dunkle OSTS.
[SPEAKER_02]: Dunkle OSTS is how I always started pronounce Dunkle OSTS.
[SPEAKER_02]: Dunkle OSTS.
[SPEAKER_02]: There you go, Dunkle OSTS.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm just going to call the dunk for the rest of the episode, but it's Dunkle OSTS.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's for everybody that knows we're going to go with the
[SPEAKER_02]: The Dunk was a giant, armored fish that lived over a hundred million years before the dinosaurs were on the earth.
[SPEAKER_02]: The name Dunklossius is Greek for the Dunkle bone.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was found anywhere in the shallow seas worldwide.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was from the Lake Devonian, which in the conventional time scale was 380 to 360 million years ago.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's size and weight are heavily contested because it's giant armored head or about the only thing that really fast lies well on it.
[SPEAKER_02]: So if it was oversized head and a regular body, it would be like 12 feet long and like 2,000 pounds.
[SPEAKER_02]: Some of the larger instruments so put it up to 30 feet long and four tons.
[SPEAKER_02]: What did it eat?
[SPEAKER_02]: Anything it wanted to.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was a carnivore.
[SPEAKER_02]: The contents of their stomach found everything with every armor plated animal would be crushed up.
[SPEAKER_02]: uh... distinguishing features it's extremely large size it's lack of teeth and it's thick armor planning especially ground ahead this marine animal was from the devalent period over a hundred million years before the first dinosaurs uh... tend to be small and weak but done classius was the exception that proved the rule this huge about thirty feet long three tonne animal was an armored covered prehistoric fish was probably one of the largest vertebrates of its day
[SPEAKER_02]: and was certainly the largest fish of the Devonian seas.
[SPEAKER_02]: Reconstructions can be a bit finicky, but don't classes likely resemble the large underwater tank, but if it's thick body, it's a bulbous bulging head in massive toothless jaw.
[SPEAKER_02]: The dunkel wouldn't have been particularly good at swimming.
[SPEAKER_02]: Those giant slow-moving animals, since it was covered in just giant plates of boni armor, which would serve as significant defense against the smaller predatory sharks and fins of its burning habitat.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because so many fossils of the dunkel have been discovered, paleontologists know a good deal about their behaviors and physiology and their reproductive and life cycle.
[SPEAKER_02]: For example, there's some evidence that individuals of this genus occasionally cannibalize each other while others pray or pray fish, Rand Low, an analysis of the Dunkloss's jaw bone had demonstrated that vertebrate can have a bite force, about 8,000 pounds per square inch.
[SPEAKER_02]: Putting it in leagues with both much larger transaurus wrecks in the much larger and great or great shark megadon.
[SPEAKER_02]: So basically, even though it's smaller than both of those animals, it's bite forces right up there with them.
[SPEAKER_02]: And like I already said, there didn't have teeth.
[SPEAKER_02]: It had four shearing cutting sharp gel bones.
[SPEAKER_02]: Uh, kind of thinking like a turtle's beak.
[SPEAKER_02]: So these just giant like hinges that it would guillotines.
[SPEAKER_02]: The dunk was known to be about 10 species, which had been excavated in North America, Western Europe, in Northern Africa.
[SPEAKER_02]: The type species, Dunkilastia's Torel, has been discovered in various United States, including Texas, California, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.
[SPEAKER_02]: Bump, Bump, Bump, D, or Dunkilassius Belgius was found in Belgium.
[SPEAKER_02]: Dunkilassius, Mars and Man was found in Morocco.
[SPEAKER_02]: Though this species may one day be synonymous with another genus of armored fish, East during Montana's, and D, or Dunkilassius, and Biorite, this was discovered in Canada.
[SPEAKER_02]: Other small species have been native to the states far as New York and Mississippi.
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, so, you know, one of its freaky fun effects is it's this state basically extinct animal is the dunkloss it's and they just put up a giant fiberglass model that had one it's 21 feet long and J fell inside its mouth trying to pretend and he got hurt.
[SPEAKER_02]: because the teeth hurt him.
[SPEAKER_02]: Given it's nearly worldwide success, the dunk was 360 million years ago.
[SPEAKER_02]: The obvious question, they present itself, why did this armoured fish go extinct at the start of the carboniferous period, along with its placoderm cousins, which if you guys are interested in placoderms, we'll do a whole episode on them.
[SPEAKER_02]: They have placoderms
[SPEAKER_02]: uh basically the most likely explanation is these guys were designed they were not very fast they had these gigantic crushing jaws and they were just designed to really catch other heavily armored slow-moving animals so the leading theory is and they started the carboniferous fish like sharks and other ray fin fish
[SPEAKER_02]: that they are getting so much faster that the dunk couldn't catch up.
[SPEAKER_02]: So basically they starve to extinction.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's also another thing that was called the Harbinger event, which is believed to cause oxygen marine oxygen levels to plunge, which for large fish was a gas sentence, because they required so much more oxygen and a multi-toned,
[SPEAKER_02]: uh but yeah so this isn't the dunk is just a crazy looking thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: These giant shearing jails um they ate each other.
[SPEAKER_02]: I already said that.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, you guys, so the reconstructions of their heads, so, you know, how you tell a fish skull from another skull is how many bones are in the head, every other type of skull only has two bones and then fish have like a ton, but these gigantic fused plates and these hinge jaws and there are a bunch of depictions that put this animal with its armor plating on the
[SPEAKER_02]: Uh, so we wouldn't be like so the armor plating is on the outside of the skin.
[SPEAKER_02]: But the more more likely that it would be underneath the layer of skin, and they're starting to show more reconstructions with that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, if you go to the Ohio State Fair, if you go to the Ohio State like nature center and stuff like that, they have a bunch about it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And they just added this animal onto the Ohio State Fair carousel.
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's pretty cool.
[SPEAKER_02]: I like it a lot.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a pretty cool fish.
[SPEAKER_02]: I would bring it back because I this is probably a fish.
[SPEAKER_02]: I could even out swim.
[SPEAKER_02]: But yeah, it's gonna be a little bit of a shorter one this week.
[SPEAKER_02]: We had some time constraints of stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I just wanted to get one in here.
[SPEAKER_02]: So hopefully you guys have a good week.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're getting nearer the fall season.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we guys start enjoying that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Remember, we here we love you guys.
[SPEAKER_02]: Do a random act of kindness for a stranger.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we'll catch you guys.
[SPEAKER_02]: Bye.
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