This species, which measured about three meters long and weighed between 200 and 400 kilograms, lived about 12 million years ago along the Pacific coasts of North America and Japan.
A paper published in the journal Plos One suggested that the teeth pointed to one side, like a wild boar’s tusks, which they probably used to defend their territory or protect themselves from predators.
Experts assume that these tusks could also have been used to dig nests in river beds to spawn.
Salmon could have been a filter-feeding animal that fed on small organisms called plankton and that would have been the source of their large size.
According to specialists, this specimen has an unusually large number of gill rakers (like baleen whales), so filter feeding with these gill receptors possibly helped them grow and obtain numerous nutrients.
Whatever the use of the fangs, it was almost certainly not to kill prey, they noted.
lam/lpn
