| “ | That is one grotesque fish! That looks more like a bulldog than a fish. If the Devil kept fish, this would be one of them! Xiphactinus, a predatory fish up to 20 feet long. | ” |
– Nigel Marven talking about Xiphactinus | ||
Xiphactinus was a prehistoric predatory fish, featured in the last episode of Sea Monsters. It was over 20 feet (6 m) long and lived 100,000,000-66,040,000 BCE. A teleost, bony fish, this creature was not a close relative of the sharks, though its' name, translated from Latin, means "Swift shark".
Facts[]
Xiphactinus vaguely resembled a mix of a piranha and a barracuda, with long streamlined bodies and flat heads with jagged sharp toothed mouths. Xiphactinus could swallow a Hesperornis whole in one go. However, there are also fossils of this fish showing that it had died having choked on such large prey.
Xiphactinus was a carnivore of the Cretaceous seas, but not a top one: it was prey to giant mosasaurs that lived alongside it at that time, as shown in the introduction to Sea Monsters. It is likely, however, that if Xiphactinus lived and hunted in small shoals, it could possibly predate injured Giant Mosasaurs. Itself, Xiphactinus hunted anything that was smaller than itself; in the last episode of Sea Monsters, it was shown preparing to attack Nigel Marven swimming back into the surface while the Archelon swims away, before, presumably, being scared away by a Mosasaur pod.
Gallery[]
Appearances[]
A Xiphactinus eating a Hesperornis whole.
Trivia[]
- One scene shows that another Tylosaurus bites off the Xiphactinus' tail.