A Candidate For A Darwin Award: A 370Ma Placoderm
Monday, March 14, 2011 - 17:10
in Paleontology & Archaeology
Everyone's heard of the Darwin Awards, right? It's where some poor soul dies in such a monumentally stupid way that it can be considered that they have done the human gene pool a great favour by inadvertantly altruistically killing themselves and removing their genes. Well, I have a candidate from the fossil record; a late famennian placoderm, that definitely deserves such an accolade. Firstly though, a quick primer on placoderms. In short, they were big armoured predatory fishes that were widespread in the Devonian. But, by big, I mean really big. Some of these dudes were as big as a double decker bus and would have pretty happily chomped through a car like it was a ham sandwich. read more