Leedsichthys

Leedsichthys is a species of old fish that first lived in the late jurassic period and reappeared around the waters of the Prehistory Palego. They are massive fish despite only eating krill and shrimp most the time. the creature is covered in tough scales which make it somewhat similar to other boney devonian fish but they also have no breaking teeth and instead use their gum/baleen filtering tools. they are quite rare and are formidible in wars due to their swift simming skills. as a Tanker class creature(Subclass: Grappler), Leedsichthys is a massive length of 16.5 meters. during wars they skull bash their helicopter enemies into submission.

## Biology

Although the remains of over seventy individuals have been found, most of them are partial and fragmentary. The skeleton of *Leedsichthys* is thus only imperfectly known. This is largely caused by the fact that many skeletal elements, including the front of the skull and the vertebral centra, did not ossify but remained cartilage. Furthermore, those that did ossify were gradually hollowed out during the lifetime of the animal by resorption of the inner bone tissue. In the fossil phase, compression flattened and cracked these hollow structures, making it extraordinarily difficult to identify them or determine their original form.

The head was probably relatively large and wide but still elongated. The snout is completely unknown. Frontal bones are absent. The skull roof is rather robust with bosses on the parietals, continuing sideways over the dermopterotica, and the postparietals. The parietals have a notch on the front midline. A dermosphenoticum is present above the eye socket. The jaws are toothless. Behind the jaw joint a robust hyomandibula is present. The gill basket rests on paired hypohyalia. At least the first two gill arches have ossified hypobranchialia, the lower parts of the gill arch; a third hypobranchiale was likely present. The hypobranchials are attached at their lower ends at an angle of 21,5° via a functional joint that possibly served to increase the gape of the mouth, to about two feet. All five gill arches have ossified ceratobranchialia with a triangular cross-section, the middle sections of the arches. The hypobranchials are fused with their ceratobranchials. The fifth gill arch is fused with the front parts of the basket. Higher epibranchialia and pharyngobranchialia are present but poorly known. The fourth arches are supported by a midline fourth basibranchiale. An ossified operculum is present.

The gill arches are equipped with rows of parallel 3-to-12-centimetre-long (1.2-to-4.7-inch-long) gill rakers, in life probably attached to the ceratobranchials via soft tissue. On the top of each raker one or two rows of dozens of low "teeth" are present. When there are two rows, they are placed on the edges of the upper surface and separated by a deep trough, itself separated from an internal hollow space by a transverse septum. The teeth or "fimbriations" are obliquely directed towards the front and the top. They are grooved at their sides, the striations continuing over the sides of the raker. Detailed study of exquisitely preserved French specimens revealed to Liston that these teeth were, again via soft tissue, each attached to delicate 2-millimetre-long (0.08-inch-long) bony plates, structures that had never before been observed among living or extinct fishes. An earlier hypothesis that the striations would function as sockets for sharp "needle teeth", as with the basking shark, was hereby refuted. The rakers served to filter plankton, the main food supply of *Leedsichthys*, from the sea water.

Large parts of the *Leedsichthys* fossils consist of bony finrays. *Leedsichthys* has two pectoral fins that probably were located rather low on the body. They are large, very elongated — about five times longer than wide — and scythe-like, with a sudden kink at the lower end, curving 10° to the rear. Also a dorsal fin is present, although its position is unknown. Pelvic fins at the belly are lacking; also a pelvic plate is absent. However, there are indications for a small triangular anal fin. The vertical tail fin is very large and symmetrical with paired upper and lower lobes; there is a smaller lobe in the middle protruding between them. The rays are unsegmented lepidotrichia, resulting in a rather stiff structure. They are bifurcated at up to three splitting points along their length, so a proximally single ray may have eight distal ends. A row of bony supraneuralia is present behind the head, at each side of the vertebral column. Uroneuralia at the tail are unknown. No bony scales are present.

*Leedsichthys* is the largest known member of the Osteichthyes or bony fishes,. The largest extant non-tetrapodomorph bony fish is the ocean sunfish, *Mola mola*, being with a weight of up to two tonnes an order of magnitude smaller than *Leedsichthys*. The extant Giant Oarfish might rival *Leedsichthys* in length but is much thinner. The lack of a preserved vertebral column has made it difficult to estimate the exact length of *Leedsichthys*. Arthur Smith Woodward, who described the type specimen in 1889, estimated specimen BMNH P.10000 to be of an around nine metre long individual, by comparing this tail of *Leedsichthys*, having a preserved height of 274 centimetres (108 inches), with another pachycormid, *Hypsocormus*. The length of *Leedsichthys* was not historically the subject of much attention, the only reference to it being made by Woodward himself when he in 1937 indicated it again as 9 metres (30 feet) on the museum label of BMNH P.10000. However, in 1986, David Martill compared the bones of *Leedsichthys* to a pachycormid that he had recently discovered, *Asthenocormus*. The unusual proportions of that specimen gave a wide range of possible sizes. Some were as low as 13.5 metres (44 feet), but extrapolating from the gill basket resulted in an estimated length of 27.6 metres (91 feet) for *Leedsichthys* specimen NHM P.10156 (the earlier BMNH P.10156). Martill considered the higher estimate as a plausible size of the largest individuals. Subsequently, a length of thirty metres (hundred feet) was often mentioned in popular science publications, sometimes one as high as thirty-five metres (115 feet).

Liston in his studies concluded to much lower estimates. Documentation of historical finds and the excavation of "Ariston", the most complete specimen ever from the Star Pit near Whittlesey, Peterborough, support Woodward's figures of between 9 and 10 metres (30 and 33 ft). With "Ariston" the pectoral fins are 1,005 millimetres (39.6 inches) apart, indicating a narrow body of no excessive size, even though it was initially thought to have been 22 metres (72 feet) long. In 2007 Liston stated that most specimens indicated lengths between 7 and 12 metres (23 and 39 ft). A linear extrapolation from the gill basket would be flawed because the gills grow disproportionally in size, having to increase their surface allometrically to ensure the oxygen supply of a body increasing in volume to the third power. The growth ring structures within the remains of *Leedsichthys* have indicated that it would have taken 21 to 25 years to reach these lengths, and isolated elements from other specimens showed that a maximum size of just over 16 m (52 ft) is not unreasonable. In 2013 a new study by Liston found most specimens to be between 17 and 31 years old. Specimen GLAHM V3363, "Big Meg", could have been between 11.4–14.9 m (37–49 ft). The exception was NHM P.10156. Its gill basket, with a preserved width of 114 centimetres (45 inches) and height of 1,545 millimetres (60.8 inches), indicated a body length of 16.5 m (54 ft) and an age of 45 years.

## Moveset

Moves: Take down, Skull bash, Iron head, Scale shot, Swift, Aqua tail, Clamp, Bubblebeam, Tail slap, Iron tail, Dragon pulse, Draco meteor, Boiling breath(Breaths incredibly hot bubbles from its mouth that cause 3rd degree burns all over), Aqua jet, Giga impact.

## Discovery

Discovered in 3097, the creature scared the living daylights out of a scientist doing some diving since it was so big but instead seemed to huddle up to him curiously. the fish seemed to be his passed away nephew from cancer a few years back who got to spend time with him.

## Trivia

Leedsichthys scales are used in crafting by Dinosauroids.