Prehistoric 'Alien' Armoured Fish Discovered | 7 Days of Science

A bizarre kind of prehistoric armoured fish called Alienacanthus has been described, the largest mammal from the Mesozoic Era has been discovered, a new Jurassic pterosaur has been named, and much more!
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Sources:
Which came first in the early universe?:
iopscience.iop.org/article/10...
www.sci.news/astronomy/early-...
Orca calf presumed dead:
www.seattletimes.com/seattle-...
Placoderm ‘alien’ fish with extreme lower jaw elongation Alienacanthus:
royalsocietypublishing.org/do...
New stegosaur Yanbeilong ultimus from China:
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/...
The largest Mesozoic mammal Patagomaia chainko:
www.nature.com/articles/s4159...
Summary of pterosaur history, diversity and extinction:
www.lyellcollection.org/doi/1...
New pterosaur species from Scotland Ceoptera evansae:
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/...
Homo sapiens reached the higher latitudes of Europe by 45k years ago:
www.nature.com/articles/d4158...
www.nature.com/articles/s4158...
www.nature.com/articles/s4155...
www.nature.com/articles/s4155...
0:00 - Introduction
0:25 - What came first in the early universe?
1:53 - Orca calf presumed dead
3:35 - Prehistoric 'alien' fish described
5:26 - New stegosaur species named
6:41 - Biggest mammal from the Mesozoic discovered!
8:30 - Review of recent pterosaur research
9:25 - New pterosaur species named from Scotland
10:35 - Homo sapiens in northern Europe 45k years ago
12:30 - Bloopers

[@gafrers]

When will Emilia get her own Cardboard cutout?

[@lamecasuelas2]

Nah, she should get a puppet

[@HLBear]

​@@lamecasuelas2 Mysogenist much?

[@HLBear]

Gafrers, I think she's good as is.

[@gafrers]

@@HLBear Not saying she is bad. Just saying that she is the only one not being "cardboarded" Yet. I love all 3 Presenters

[@eRic-hr3yl]

Wait Ive never seen cardboard Ben

[@natalianada2420]

The recent trend of AI paleoart is really disconcerting. Important to remind people that paleoartists are valuable to science.

[@bustavonnutz]

It'll never catch on as long as they are riddling with inaccuracies. You can't get away with AI Paleoart when scientific detail is currently so important.

[@DG-iw3yw]

The problem with using ai to produce products based on previous ones is we are hampering our innovation. Its literally a lazy device to stop us from needing to come up with any ideas. Its silly, just another step on the ladder to dumbing down the average person

[@carrott36]

@@infra_GrayFor now, AI paleoart can be inaccurate and problematic in how it gets simple details wrong that could change our view of a species.

[@rachelthecool2880]

​@@infra_Gray contempt for artists is so weird, how jealous are you of others' talents lol

[@peterdrieen6852]

AI created images are no 'art' if you ask me, it's a threat and insult towards artists.

[@jonnywanabe]

Love describing an ancient creature as ‘an absolute unit’. Brilliant!

[@michaellewellyn9080]

Very Madonna 1990's

[@rileyernst9086]

I love Mark Witton's art, particular his pterasaur stuff. It's pretty hard to beat having a leading pterasaur researcher depicting the animals for accuracy. Especially as they're not really the most conventional of critters.

[@leoboussami]

Nice to see Emilia getting better and more confident at pronouncing weird latin prehistoric animal names. Keep it up!

[@darthcheney7447]

7 DOS makes learning fun.

[@sonorasgirl]

Emilia is such a fun presenter - everyone is great and she’s a lovely addition to the group!

[@chancegivens9390]

Emilia is fun! And I can't wait for them to find a mammal within the hundred pound range that lived during the mesozoic!

[@sassa82]

7 days of fun!

[@filippozauc]

I personally found once fragmentary jaw of Alienagnathus in Ostrówka quarry and it's absolutelly fantastic to see this fish being redescribed

[@georget4141]

i love that Julia d’Oleveira is like the de facto pterosaur artist. she just depicts them so beautifully

[@adriennewilson7192]

As someone who LOVES marine fossil, and adores the oddity type of fossilized life. Today is an amazing day ❤ lovely work y'all!!!

[@lassenker07]

Mewing fish (I'm sorry) Perhaps it used the extended jaw to stir the seabed in search of benthic prey?

[@DryptosaurusDavid]

Lol

[@harrywoodman2988]

or its a reverse swordfish

[@AlbertaGeek]

@@harrywoodman2988 Wouldn't the opposite be a shieldfish?

[@kensmith5694]

It could have had a lot of nerves in it and served to sense the electrical signals from the prey.

[@XMfranchiseStudios]

This fish Fr think he a mewing grimace shake Ohio at 3 AM Skibidi looksmaxxing sigma rizzler with level 5 gyatt speed in KFC sussy baka amogus fanum tax Pizza tower with Mr Beast Burger who buckles my shoes 😂

[@IamaKaliedoscope]

I love Emilia so much. She is adorable.

[@gattycroc8073]

I wonder what else is waiting to be found in the Chorrillo Formation. we got Maip in 2022, Patagorhynchus in 2023, and now Patagomaia in 2024 so what's next.

[@migarsormrapophis2755]

He's just a swordfish with the sword on the mandible instead of the cranium (probably the wrong terms for ancient fish, but hopefully you get what I mean)

[@greenman720]

It’s not necessarily the dams that have stopped the Chinook salmon. It’s the poor stewardship of the hatchery and how they have been releasing fewer and fewer salmon as the years have gone by this all could be fixed if they managed hatchery correctly. Furthermore, only the grand Cooley dam blocks salmon from going upstream..

[@eewilson9835]

Thanks for sharing, I always tell people that they did not have to do the Albini Falls Dam.

[@kensmith5694]

On the stegosaurus: Did they find the thagomizer part of the new guy. I suspect that the evolution of that part along with the spikes along the back went all over the place over time. They would have had an impact on recognition for mating as well as on what they swung it at.

[@thesjkexperience]

Thank you for leaving in natural pauses! So many educational videos sound like a run on sentence and you have no time to swallow the information you were just given. 🎉🎉

[@DryptosaurusDavid]

So cool for Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals to have coexisted.

[@kaijuar2003]

We've known that Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis had coexisted for a long time.

[@EvilTwinRC51]

They did more than coexist. 😉

[@michaellewellyn9080]

You mean : " humped"

[@AmonTheWitch]

​@@EvilTwinRC51unfortunately

[@seretith3513]

​@@AmonTheWitchunfortonatly? I have some of those Genes, and i feel great.

[@AndreaMelk92]

Emilia we all love you ❤

[@takenname8053]

Didn't know there was Cretaceous Stegosaurs

[@flamencoprof]

06:41 Hah! As a New Zealander and ex-Gondwanian, I was getting all patriotic to hear of a Gandwanian origin for modern mammals. Then I remembered that ackshually we have no history of any mammals (except the bats, but they flew here and don't count).

[@andreagriffiths3512]

Your Aussie neighbour here, got the same feels and managed to keep them since we do have all the odd mammals and monotremes 😘

[@v_zach]

A cretaceous stegosaur. Very cool. So the tyrannosaur vs. stegosaur fight in Fantasia could have been accurate after all.

[@theangrysuchomimus5163]

No. Tyrannosaurus lived at the end of the cretaceous while this stegosaur lived during the early cretaceous.

[@v_zach]

@@theangrysuchomimus5163 Ok. Thanks.

[@JohnyG29]

And t-rex lived many tens of millions of years after the last Stegosaurus stegosaur died out.

[@giottist3624]

Hi Emilia - do not let confuse you! The small town in Thuringia is pronounced "Rah - Niss" wit a long a. You are completely right. Thank you for all the detailed information 👍

[@whitulf]

Great 7DOS, super well pesented by You, Emilia! Always amazing quality of explaining even complicated astrophysics topics here! And Emilia, in the "fun part" the first try of pronouncing "Ranis" with long aaaa, short i, no "ei" was very correct, followed by an "englification" anticorrection😉

[@Distant_Frontier]

This creature literally predicted the chinspike fish things in my speculative biology

[@dmhGB]

Omg! This is so fascinating

[@MrPendraeg]

Now that is what i call a fish!

[@rickybryan1759]

I love it when you host

[@lochness5524]

11:52-12:05 Jean M Auel: CALLED IT

[@tobiasware]

I was going to say the same thing.

[@thefisherking78]

Cool cohost. Fun science news. Love it!

[@Sourdo1]

Emelia is the answer to your question, "Why are we getting so many more subscriptions to the site all of a sudden?"😀

[@virginametz7409]

Love you guys! Keep up the great work ❤

[@jamesmitchell6925]

I love seven days. This channel rules.

[@kaltneta6704]

I hope the orca calf is okay.

[@BradyPhotgraphy]

Paleontology has never been more beautiful!❤

[@Mech2970]

Stay strong guys

[@patreekotime4578]

Great presentation! Absolute unit had me rolling!!!

[@user-pb8cy8oo6z]

Emilia is so great

[@tolbaszy8067]

Beautiful diction! Thanks for sharing!

[@giulianoforti542]

Love you guys, keep up the great work

[@scottwells8064]

Reminds me of an old Bill Engval joke about a fish with an under bite that got caught by a hook holding a cheeto.

[@vespurrs]

It was a corndog!

[@scottwells8064]

@@vespurrs You're right! And what's a cornsog doing out here in the ocean? But you know me, I loooooove corndogs.

[@thelaughinghyenas8465]

Enjoyable, informative, and generally quite well produced. I was particularly fascinated by the alien fish. We get lots of dinosaurs but little from that age. The The apparent demise of J60 was a sad note.

[@Lord.Kiltridge]

Bonus points for pronouncing Chinook correctly.

[@MrHavadollar]

Thanks, Emilia Good show. Just going to put a fishing rant, here... The two biggest risk factors for salmon are overfishing by offshore vessels and pollution. Dams are way... way down the list and have been so since the 1990's. You might think the salmon don't make it to spawning grounds because of the huge concrete barrier, but that isn't true in the US at least. During spawning dams use fish ladders, which are a brilliant engineering strategy that allows salmon to go up the river without encountering the barrier of the dam or life-threatening spillway. The biggest issues are that the populations aren't capable of growing fast enough to counteract overfishing. I don't mean your uncle Sam and his buddy James with fishing poles. There's nothing wrong with catching a few salmon like that for the dinner table. No, I mean the international commercial fishing boats that line the estuaries with nets that catch salmon by the millions. We have our own laws against overfishing, but that doesn't stop boats from countries like Japan and Russia from camping out at the ends of our rivers. Not everybody can be trusted to be environmentally responsible and ethical when it comes to other nation's environmental resources. Can we do an episode that touches on the evolution of transitory freshwater/saltwater migration and glacial melt?

[@rileyernst9086]

I really think we should divide the Cretaceous into 3 different time zones. Having to say early late Cretaceous to mean something that lived in the Aptian or Cenomanian, well that's the middle point of the Cretaceous both chronologically, and as a distinct fauna stage isn't it? As the late early Cretaceous holds more similarities to this time than the early early Cretaceous.

[@johnsalisbury3768]

This is savage. Science gang!

[@michaelfaulkner6607]

Love your channel!

[@RubiksBotES]

She got your viewership skyrocketing

[@andreagriffiths3512]

Loved the Gondwana bit - just read a book about Gondwana and it was really interesting.

[@GiffysChannel]

3:26 We absolutely need more salmon ladders. I would prefer a more natural looking side stream for the salmon but definitely salmon ladders at the very least. Hydro is definitely the cleanest renewable energy source. Lightyears over solar or wind.

[@wallace2286]

Man Cretaceous South America was such an interesting place that fact that you had many non dinosaurian animals like mamals and land crocs rise to such (relatively speaking) high positions ecologically is very fascinating. It’s honestly a shame that even if the asteroid hadn’t hit this arrangement probably wouldn’t have lasted.

[@knickebien1966]

6:55 Ohhhh my!

[@a5cent]

Wow. Ben is prettier than ever! ❤

[@pedrogabrielduarte4544]

I have a question:when i look at species with least concern categories's articles on Wikipedia their Pages are much smaller than species with much greater threat of extinction why is that?: ALL species must be Studied even though some are not threatened with extinction! so why like big animals are much more Studied than smaller Animals?

[@matheushjacubowski4073]

Wow, a halfbeak-like placoderm, the biggest mesozoic mammal ever found , a cretaceous stegosaur and a new scottish pterosaur!? This sure was a great week for paleontology (also the fact that the biggest mesozoic mammal was found in South America makes me really happy as I'm a south american myself!😁).Also I loved the video🦴🦕

[@tonydagostino6158]

Just a note on Spanish. Two l's, as in Chorillo, are pronounced like a "y"

[@matthewdavies2057]

A well done report. 👍

[@garethmiguel]

Can someone pass on a message to Ben's mum that I sent her new video to a friend to play for his 5 year old daughter and she was absolutely transfixed to the phone for the whole thing! Her dad said it was miraculous XD. Please release the next episodes soon!

[@knickebien1966]

9:57 Let's start a band and call it ...!

[@knickebien1966]

Ahhhh ... Emilia returns!!

[@Jpteryx]

Wow, Patagomaia was as big as the average modern coyote!

[@pencilpauli9442]

Great stuff thanks. Nealy as good as Emelia's dress, even!

[@XMfranchiseStudios]

After getting into the military interest I lost my interest in Palaeontology for a bit, luckily I'm back, and have both interests and study them interchangeably.

[@christophkuropkaGR]

It would be something like: "Rah-Ness" (the town in D) - but thanks for trying in such an entertaining way...

[@Iwansidi]

Hello @BenGThomas I have a video request: A common theme is that many dinosaurs were hunting in packs and showed some form of cooperation like many mammals do. However, I am not aware of any birds or reptiles living today that are really cooperating and hunting in groups. So where does this assumption come from. Why should modern reptiles have lost that ability? To me that is very unlikely...please explain :)

[@williamblansett5786]

I love the way she givesher personal touches to her presentations. That being said, presumely "Soutern" Orcas live south of the Equator. So if it is Salmon that are keeping these Orcas from starvation, then it is an invasive species that is keeping the Orcas alive. Salmon did not exist south of the Equator until man introduce them and trout there.

[@allisoncurtis4260]

No these are near Vancouver, so pacific north west of the usa.

[@MermaidMakes]

You’re looking gorgeous these days, Ben! You’re simply GLOWING!

[@sonjanordahl3158]

My complements. Some of those names are a real mouthful.

[@Fuck_Snowflakes]

I could listen to you speak all day. I’m in love.

[@royireland1127]

That beaked fossil fish looks very similar to the beaked flying fishes though I am sure size and weight preclude a similar lifestyle

[@thegodofroblox8492]

I don’t know how I haven’t subscribed yet but I just did

[@chpet1655]

You should probably tell everyone where the Orca Pods actually are. In this case they are off Vancouver Island and Puget Sound in the Pacific North West of North America….ie around Vancouver/ Victoria and Seattle

[@levislevitas]

the most interesting thing about southern resident orcas is that they are perfectly capable of eating other things, yet seem to accept starvation instead of just eating other fish. it's a case of culture dominating nature, creating a superceding layer of meaning that directs actions in a way that could become unsync'd to reality. reminds us of the power of human social culture/ideological behavior that can sometimes become desync'd with reality as well. so the irrationality of their cultural practice and the possibility of this irrationality is the most interesting thing.

[@phillipmitchell2254]

Sounds like y'all got over that cold ha

[@ericvogt3313]

She's great!

[@marizuokereke7347]

Beavis fish. Ace!

[@tomholroyd7519]

absolute unit

[@gl15col]

Concerning the Southern resident orcas; the dams on the Klamath River should be gone by this summer; the 4th and last was just breached. This should help save the salmon run that the Southern resident orcas and Native American tribes depend on.

[@keithfaulkner6319]

It would seem like animals as smart as orcas would pack up and move elsewhere when rhe food runs out. It's a big ocean, there's nothing to stop them from leaving.

[@Terrik240]

Unrelated, but that is a very cute blouse.

[@sp00n]

Ranis would probably be pronounced Rahnis. Never heard of it, but that's the usual pronunciation. And for Ilsenhöhle you could probably also just say Ilsen cave.

[@markaxworthy2508]

What was the Alienacanthus fish armoured against?

[@michaellewellyn9080]

Life

[@markaxworthy2508]

@@michaellewellyn9080 That clearly worked well - they've been extinct for nearly 300 million years!

[@patreekotime4578]

Crazy stuff like Dunkleosteus... who was also armored!

[@alfredlaalpacadeageofempir9215]

Lancer Class Feesh.

[@southmark]

Mercy!

[@LordProtectorPepper]

I love when someone uses the word fishes correctly, it feels so wrong

[@hodgenick]

ABSOLUTE UNIT

[@Thundernugget]

Reverse Swordfish or Reverse Sawfish?

[@AryadiSubagio]

How did early homo sapiens live in cold weather? Did they already wear animal fur on their body?

[@TheBeverlyp3132]

Nice

[@jan-seli]

Swordfish but he's holding the blade underhanded

[@stephenleblanc4677]

Ben, the lipstick looks great. Totally transforms you.

[@properuser]

Bro when did you transition gfy

[@lukash1631]

Don't worry. Ranis is a super weird name for a German town. Sounds French

[@rubenkoker1911]

guess somescottish scientist named a pterosaur after a cute presenter

[@tlfortynine]

MEWING FEESH

[@SiqueScarface]

I guess, not many Germans will pronounce Ranis correctly the first time (it's similar to Rahness). And I hereby apologize to all non-native German speakers who have to pronounce Delitzschala bitterfeldensis (the oldest known winged insect), because I know that many Germans pronounce Delitzsch (one of the towns the insect is named for, the other town being Bitterfeld) wrongly. Hint: The 'z' is silent.

[@oreosaurs2658]

When Wallace II part 3

[@RandyLe-cb2eb]

Dragon lady❤