Dunkleosteus terrelli

The Dunkleosteus belongs to the placoderm group, fossil vertebrates with jaws and a shell made up of plates of dermal bone. They lived in the Devonian, a period of the Middle Palaeozoic that lasted about 50 million years.

Several hundred placoderm species have been described and they provide an excellent model for analysing the modalities of the evolution of jawed vertebrates (gnathostomata). They display a wide diversity of forms and sizes, ranging from a few centimetres to several metres in length.

They became extinct at the end of the Devonian, a geological period marked by one of the five great extinctions in biodiversity, taking with them a large number of secrets that make them the Palaeozoic equivalents of the dinosaurs of the Mesozoic.