Top 10 Biggest Animals To Ever Roam The Earth

Top 10 Biggest Animals To Ever Roam The Earth Subscribe to Viral Now: /user/butterarmour Viral Now is the #1 place for all your heart warming stories about amazing people that will inspire you everyday. Make sure to subscribe and never miss a single video! #viral #amazing #ViralNow Top 10 Biggest Animals That Ever Roamed the Earth! Today, the earth is home to the largest animal that ever lived, the blue whale. In fact, paleontologists believe that no other animal weighed as heavy as this mammoth of mammal! Okay, so the large dinosaurs tend to grab more than their fair share of attention. But there have been many other giant animals that we will never get to see in the flesh...but are truly terrifying!!! Some are so super-sized and weird that it’s hard to believe they existed. Let’s look at 10 behemoths from the past that would truly scare you straight... 10. Aegirocassis benmoulae /watch/cnRR-AAqoK6qR What would the offspring of a whale and a lobster look like? If such a thing were possible it might look something like Aegirocassis benmoulae. Reaching 2m long, it lived around 480 million years ago and belonged to an extinct family of marine animals called the anomalocaridids. The alien-looking creature had net-like sieves, attached to appendages on its head, that it used to filter plankton from seawater to eat. It lived at a time when plankton were becoming more diverse, allowing it to take up a different lifestyle to most anomalocaridids, which were sharp-toothed predators. This strange creature could help reveal how the limbs of arthropods – that's modern spiders, insects, and crustaceans – evolved. Based on earlier, less complete remains, anomalocaridids were thought to have just one pair of swimming flaps per body segment. However, A. benmoulae clearly had two pairs per segment. In a paper published in Nature in March 2015, researchers showed that A. benmoulae's twin flaps correspond to the upper and lower segments of modern arthropod limbs. They re-examined other anomalocaridid fossils and found that they too had twin pairs of flaps. They concluded that in some species evolutionary pressures caused the flaps to fuse. This suggests anomalocaridids were early arthropods. This has long been in question, thanks to their bizarre bodies. Until 1985, paleontologists thought their spiny head appendages were the bodies of shrimps, their toothed mouths were jellyfish, and their bodies sea cucumbers. 9. Jaekelopterus rhenaniae /watch/kuZY4ChP2NEPY Jaekelopterus rhenaniae is an arachnophobe's ultimate nightmare. At 2.5m long, this giant 'sea scorpion' has a claim to the title of largest arthropod ever to have lived. Its common name is misleading. They weren't true scorpions, and probably scuttled about in lakes and rivers rather than the ocean. J. rhenaniae lived about 390 million years ago and spent its time chopping up fish. It was described in 2008, after a spiked claw measuring 46cm was found in a quarry in Prüm, Germany. This was all that remained of the animal. However, the ratio between claw and body size is pretty constant in sea scorpions, so researchers were able to estimate that J. rhenaniae was 233-259cm long. The discovery is another piece of evidence that arthropods were significantly larger in the past. No one is sure why prehistoric creepy-crawlies were super-sized. Some suggest the answer lies in the atmosphere, which at times contained more oxygen than it does now. Others highlight a lack of backboned predators such as fish. 8. Arthropleura /watch/0c7ti0A4Ans4t /watch/4cBEN2DsCjjsE Also in contention for the largest arthropod in history were the Arthropleura, a genus of millipedes up to 2.6m long. They lived between 340 and 280 million years ago, and may also have benefitted from higher levels of oxygen in the air. No-one has discovered a complete fossil. Partial remains 90cm (3ft) long were uncovered in south-west Germany, and trackways attributed to them have been found in Scotland, the US, and Canada. It seems Arthropleura bodies were made up of around 30 jointed segments covered by side plates and a central plate. Because the remains of Arthropleura mouths have never been found, it is difficult to say for sure what they ate. Researchers who have examined their fossilized excrement have found fern spores, suggesting they fed on plants. Arthropleura has proved popular with film-makers, featuring in the BBC's Walking with Monsters in 2005 and First Life in 2010.

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