Giant Predatory Whale "Ate Other Whales for Breakfast"
Scientists find fossil of giant predatory whale:
...The scientists call the creature Leviathan melvillei. "Leviathan" means sea monster, and "melvillei" refers, of course, to Herman Melville, who wrote the greatest of whale stories, Moby-Dick. Paleontologist Olivier Lambert says he's read that book — several times...
OK, OK, you're literate, we get it.
...But Leviathan had an astonishing set of choppers. "These are probably the largest teeth that I have ever seen," says Lambert. "The maximum length of some of the teeth is 36 centimeters." That would be about 15 inches long — and 4 to 5 inches wide at the base. "It looks like an elephant tusk," Lambert says of the whale's tooth. "It's really big."
The mouth was about 9 feet long and up to 7 feet wide. The upper and lower teeth interlocked when the mouth closed — good for securing prey and ripping through flesh. And the skull suggests very powerful biting muscles, thus the "giant bite" in the title of the research paper, which appears in the journal Nature...
How big a fly rod do you need for that? Maybe livelining is a better option, and better use a steel leader.
I expected you to go with "The Doors of His Face, The Lamp of His Mouth"
ReplyDeleteby Roger Zelazny