Leedsichthys Pronunciation

Fun Facts

• ✓Estimates of Leedsichthys's length have ranged from 30 ft all the way to over 90 ft, and scientists are still debating the true maximum size because so few complete skeletons exist.
• ✓Alfred Leeds, the Victorian farmer and fossil collector who found the first specimen in 1886 near Peterborough, sold his remarkable collection to the Natural History Museum in London and the Museum of Natural History in Berlin.
• ✓Leedsichthys belonged to an extinct group called Pachycormidae, a family of ray-finned fish that independently evolved filter feeding at least twice, making them a spectacular example of convergent evolution with modern whale sharks and basking sharks.
• ✓Because Leedsichthys had a largely cartilaginous skeleton, fossils are almost always fragmentary, found as scattered bony plates and fin rays, which is why scientists spent over a century wildly underestimating and then overestimating its true size.
• ✓A 2013 study led by researchers Jeff Liston and colleagues used growth ring analysis on fin ray bones to estimate that some individuals lived for at least 20 to 40 years and grew continuously throughout their lives, similar to modern large sharks.