These Were The Biggest Land Predators Ever

Megatheropods were the most powerful terrestrial carnivores in Earth's long history, and recent studies show that theropods like Tyrannosaurus may have been bigger than expected. The Mesozoic was a beautiful nightmare, and the rulers of that nightmare realm were the megatheropods: bipedal dinosaurs closely related to birds but bigger than African elephants. The elite group includes household names like Tyrannosaurus, Spinosaurus, and Carcharodontosaurus, each of which had unique adaptations that cemented them as apex predators that would be terrifyingly alien to us humans. While other beasts like sebecids, huge bears, and hyaenodonts were fearsome in their own right, none even came close to the level of the megatheropods. But among the most formidable theropods to ever walk the earth, only one species could truly claim the crown of the biggest ever. What was that animal? How big could it really get, and what would its size tell us about its ancient ecosystem? These dinosaurs were the biggest land predators ever.

The Mesozoic Nightmare: 00:00
What Is A Megatheropod? 00:43
Did T. rex Just Get Bigger? 00:51
The Biggest Megatheropods We Know Of: 03:48
Deinocheirus mirificus: 04:00
Tyrannotitan chubutensis: 04:43
Mapusaurus roseae: 05:06
Saurophaganax maximus: 05:56
Spinosaurus aegyptiacus: 06:13
Carcharodontosaurus saharicus: 06:53
Giganotosaurus carolinii: 07:28
Tyrannosaurus mcraeensis: 08:18
Tyrannosaurus rex: 08:39
The Biggest Theropod Possible: 10:31

Soundtrack courtesy of Paleowolf.

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[SomeKindOfDodo]

I love how the more we find of Spinosaurus, the less we actually know about it.

[pyrotron]

I am hiding a 50 ton mega-shrew in my basement that will put to shame any other superpredator >:)

[bkjeong]

A reminder that the recent study of Rex potentially getting up to 15 tons for the largest hypothetical individuals EXPLICITLY applies to ALL megatheropods as per the authors, they only used Rex as an example because it’s the least likely to have that kind of massive size variation not preserved by the fossil record (due to having more known adult specimens than the rest combined)

[retime]

"It gets huge and fat from fishing all day, it's mass fluctuating with the flow of prey" That was an intentional rhyme lol

[tamaltarudey]

Megatheropods are my favourite dinosaurs

[zeno_xy]

I don't know why I laughed so hard when you put the question mark next to spino when you were comparing dinos to rex😭😭

[tec-jones]

Another argument in favor of your giant deinocheirus hypothesis: Being partially herbivorous requires a larger gut to ferment plant material, and having access to fish and aquatic resources would allow it to bulk up. It has the same omnivorous decipe for large body size as bears like the kodiak, allowing for access to marine resources and a flexible diet that ensures calories can almost always be found and acquired.

[t-r-e-x]

9 Giants.

The Fellowship of the Sharpteeth.

[nono]

Also considering how dangerous the waters were and how it lived with sauropods (but likely didn't hunt them) a spinosaurus being super large would ultimately benefit it.

[Damasen]

"The Big Nine Max sized specimens" gave me the nine titans vibes from Attack on Titan haha

[adminbob_]

My favourite dinosaurs have to be the carcharodontosaurids. There’s just so many huge species, I find them so fascinating.

[TalesofKaimere]

Great stuff, and I appreciate your emphasis on clearing up a lot of the misconceptions surrounding the study. Also good point on the limit being less biomechanical and more ecological. Keep up the good work!

[Spalato]

9:16 The Tibia is 12.3 meters long, and the Fibula 10.8 meters according to the figures. Now that would have been one scary T. rex right there lol

[pastelchemicals]

This was such a well-researched and put together video, It's so great to see one of those "size ranking" videos for dinosaurs that doesn't sensationalize or put down any concrete claims based on unreliable evidence, while still treating the dinosaurs like actual animals that lived in the context of their environment :) Excellent work!!

[deafening_silence]

Something I want to mention is that while volumetric modeling methods can be much more precise when determining mass, there’s still an element of artistic license that’s taken into account when restoring amounts of soft tissue and applying density values to each body segment. Sue, for example has been estimated between 8, 000-10, 000Kg+ using the same method, but has varying results based on how the experts reconstructed them. When it comes to specimens that are less complete such as Scotty, more artistic liberties need to be taken when restoration missing body parts, which widens the margin of error even further.

[joepenrose]

The ONLY person on YouTube who pronounces "Giganotasaurus" correctly🤓👌👍

[The_Story_Of_Us]

I would like to point out that the idea that T-Rex specimens have hit a sort of ceiling in terms of growth isn’t just baseless speculation. We have found numerous species of Megatheropod whose largest sizes have been around 13 meters long (Spino was longer, but weighed less). Having numerous species of Megatheropod dinosaurs over a span of like 90 million years of fossil record show that 13 meters is the biggest we know of is very good reason to believe they didn’t get much bigger than that. With Sauropods it’s a different story, as their body structure is perfectly designed to support colossal bodymass. In fact all land animals we know of to reach an excess of 15 tons in weight are Quadrapeds.

I mean we can’t definitively rule out that there were VENOMOUS Megatheropods either, but the entire paleontological context surrounding the topic makes it pretty clear that isn’t the case and that we will never find a 5 foot dinosaur skull with special grooves in its teeth or whatever. And if the entire surrounding field of paleontology shows no evidence that Theropod Dinosaurs reached the kind of sizes that this paper speculates with statistical comparison to a distantly related group of extant animals, that should be what we take to be the case. I’m not going to sit here and say that it’s literally impossible that such a creature ever existed, but it’s not something we should leave on the table. All this tells us is what could hypothetically, theoretically, possibly be found out there (except probably not, even the authors would say so).

Therefore we should believe that is not the case until evidence suggests otherwise.

[ivanvukasovic]

A famous paleontologist (can't remember the name) was presenting a lecture somewhere in Europe in 2004, about the Sue specimen and her potential awareness of being a super predator. It was an eye opening theory on potential and speculative psychology of animals long gone, and how those factors might've influenced the animal's further impact on its environment.

The paleontologist was then asked: "Well about the Scotty specimen?"

And the paleontologist answered: "Oh, Scotty? Scotty didn't know."

[theaugbog]

I like this guy's honesty of the uncertainty of the topic. A lot of others want to make concrete claims with our relatively limited data at the moment for many of these animals.

[GODEYE]

Copium Rex is the boggy man

I’d be insane that despite the dangerous lifestyle we’d keep finding bigger and bigger Rex than even cope or bertha