Basilosaurus could grow to be as long as 80 feet –
or about three times the length of its descendants,
the dolphins we see in Tampa Bay today.



Original art by Sigrid Tidmore







By Buzz Kelly

In an ancient time when Tampa Bay was submerged under primordial oceans and a vast inland sea divided America in half, there were fabulous creatures everywhere – not just in the water, but in the skies, too. Today, Tampa Bay is filled with their living descendants. Some are as recent as 30 million years ago; others are 400 million years old or even more.

Fasten your seatbelts. Put your trays in the upright position. And please keep hands and feet inboard. Next stop is the Eocene era where we find…

Basilosaurus…

He swims through the blue depths of the sea, fearing nothing. He’s an apex predator, the biggest animal on the planet, twice as long as a city bus, weighing more than seven tons. His head is as big as an SUV, with jaws that could swallow a human being whole and huge teeth to rip and rend anything alive. When he rises to the surface for a gulp of air through his dorsal intake, he exhales a geyser into the sky and his inhale sounds like a train whistle. Even as huge as his body is, it’s very flexible; he swims with an eel-like motion so fast that no prey can escape him, leaving a wake behind him that makes its own current. His name is Basilosaurus, and his skeleton shows vestigial feet, evidence he evolved from a much older kind of land animal.

He became extinct 34 million years ago, but you can find his cousins all around the bay and gulf. They are often seen frolicking around our boats – those lovable, aquatic, air-breathing mammals with vestigial feet called “dolphins.”

The Jurassic, 140 million b.c. Archaeopteryx…

He means quick death to lizards and other small creatures, and if he goes hunting in a flock he can help take down even larger animals. He lives in the late Jurassic, about 140-million years ago, and is not especially big – about the size of a modern osprey. Nor can he fly very well – more of a glider than a flyer – but he is quick and agile, heavy-boned, with a mouthful of sharp teeth. He is Archaeopteryx. No birds have teeth today, but Archaeopteryx and some of his cousins at the time did. You would not want to be attacked by a flock of them.

If you pluck all the feathers off a bird – a chicken, for instance – it will look much like the raptor dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park movies. That’s because birds are descendants of the therapods, a line of reptiles that included those scary raptors and eventually led to the first true bird. Archaeopteryx. Our beautiful ospreys, pelicans, gulls and others come from this ancestor.

The Triassic, 250 million b.c. Meganeuropsis…

She swoops and dives and hovers effortlessly like a helicopter, a killing machine with few predators to match her. Her silvery wings are nearly three feet across, beating 50 times in a single second, and they propel her two-foot body with blinding speed. Her compound eyes can spot prey easily, in 3D, and she will home in on it like a missile.

She eats mostly other insects, but can grab and fly away with anything just a little smaller than she is – a small mammal, the size of a Chihuahua, say – and eat it in mid-flight with jaws that snap out from cargo doors in her head like the queen in the “Alien” movies. She is Meganeuropsis permiana, a Jurassic dragonfly from 250 million years ago, and the largest flying insect that ever lived.

Today, we Floridians love her descendants, not just because they’re fun to watch but also because they are a wonderfully successful predator of mosquitoes.

The Devonian, 400 million b.c. Jaekelopterus…

The ancestor of today's dragonfly, the Meganeuropsis had a wingspan of about three feet.

Digital image created by Karen Carr Studio for the Audubon Insectarium.

His many legs scuttle along the sea bottom, his senses sharp for possible prey, wicked claws always prepared to strike and grab. He is longer than a man is tall – over eight feet – and heavily armored from the bone-crushing mandibles at his head to his strong, flexible tail. He is Jaekelopterus, sometimes called “sea scorpion,” and he lived almost 400 million years ago. He is related to the horseshoe crabs we see today throughout the bay region. But Jaekelopterus evolved into a small land-dwelling insect – the common scorpion – and became very successful.

The scorpions scuttling on the land around Tampa Bay today are not as dangerous as Jaekelopterous must have been, and are reclusive and rarely seen. Their sting is not as deadly, and their claws and bodies are very small, something to be thankful for.

Back to Eocene, 100 million b.c. Heliobatis radians…

He flaps his wings slowly along the bays and shallow flats, flying gracefully through the warm waters. Sometimes he stops and settles to the bottom, making himself invisible by sinking under the sand. He waits patiently for prey, perhaps a small fish or baby crab, but ordinary plankton will do fine for him. He is young, two feet across from wingtip to wingtip, but if he lives long enough he could grow to several feet across and weigh nearly 200 pounds. Gentle in nature, his only protection against predators is the poisoned barb in his tail. If threatened or frightened, he whips his tail wildly to stab the barb into his attacker. He is Heliobatis radians, the stingray, and we know of him from fossils over 100 million years old.

Heliobatis was a remarkably successful species, and many different kinds of rays are still with us.

And that brings us back to today. As you boat, fish or just drive across a bridge over our waters, try to imagine what it would be like if some of those ancient animals were still around. They are part of our prehistory. It is up to us to protect and ensure the well being of their evolutionary descendants.

Buzz Kelly is a semi-retired ad executive, multi-generation Tampa native, lifetime sailor, freelance writer and commentator, who considers all of Tampa Bay his personal backyard.

(Note: although based on established fact, paleontologists are still debating some details in this article.)