The most powerful predator teeth of all time?

[callmejoe9]

The Livyatan was certainly a fantastic find. We've known about macroraptorial sperm whales for over a century now, but most of them were pretty orca-sized. I'd imagine it was quite a shock to recover the 3-meter skull from the Pisco Formation. The holotype skull is estimated to have belonged to a 13.5-meter individual when using the skull-body proportions of modern sperm whales, and 16.2-17.5 meters when a closer relative, the Zygophyseter. At the largest, this specimen likely surpassed 50 tons.

https://static-content.springer.com/esm/...M6_ESM.pdf

I ran into a paleoartist who makes a strong argument that the 16.2-meter estimate was the most reliable. Instead of using the total skull length, he focused on the occipital-atlas ratio, which was conserved between sperm whales. The substitutes he used was both the modern sperm whales and the Brygmophyseter, which was more complete than the Zygophyseter. After using the portion of the occipital bone from the holotype to get the estimated size of the occipital protrusion, he scaled the protrusions on the Brygmophyseter and modern sperm whale skeletons to the same size. This method amazing led to the size differences between the scaled substitutes to basically go away, as the overall skeletons from the neck-down were very conserved. Making some adjustments, the paleoartists could not make much room for the holotype specimen to have been too much smaller or shorter than 16.2m.


https://www.deviantart.com/harry-the-fox...-744756670


I'm only mentioning him because he uses a reasonable methodology for his argument and it was highly congruent with the official estimates anyway.

The holotype bone was originally dated at 12-13 million years old but has been updated to about 8.9-9.9 million. 
https://www.researchgate.net/publication...ne_of_Peru

Large teeth have been found in other parts of the world in the past 3 years such as Chile, Argentina, South Africa, and Australia. This suggests these creatures dominated the Southern hemisphere and went extinct in the early Pliocene. The Australian and South African estimates are the youngest at 4-5 million years old. It's a fair assumption these belonged to either the Livyatan or its close relatives because:

A. No other macroraptorial sperm whale teeth comes close to its size.

B. Other morphological characters are highly congruent.

However, given the difference in age and that teeth alone aren't very diagnostic at the species-level, it's also likely these were different species, but very close relatives. Reply