Sentences with word «mosasaur»

Harpel's discovery made it possible for them to pinpoint the Mount Laurel Formation, which was deposited below a shallow sea, in which sharks and now - extinct marine reptiles called mosasaurs also swam, about 75 million years ago.

These early mosasaurs went on to evolve into fully marine forms up to 15 metres long.

And by tracing the remains of pigments in fossils, called melanosomes, scientists have in recent years begun to breathe new life into the dun - colored relicts, discovering the Technicolor hues in prehistoric birds» wings and the clever shading that veiled ancient mosasaurs from predators.

And under one eye, this particular mosasaur's bony skull also had a large hole where something had bitten into it.

«Primitive mosasaurs were slender creatures that undulated their bodies like eels,» says Johan Lindgren of Lund University in Sweden.

The very latest mosasaurs showed an interesting evolutionary trend.

This process peaked with Plotosaurus, the most advanced mosasaur we know of.

Known only from the latest Cretaceous, the 8 - metre - long Plotosaurus hints at the way mosasaurs would have evolved — had they not gone extinct.

The only animal capable of delivering such an injury was a larger mosasaur, says Everhart (Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Sciences, vol 111, p 251).

They ate mosasaurs of different subfamilies, he says, but not their own kind.

Mosasaurs did not arrive until much later, but plesiosaurs were thriving at that time.

Gorden Bell, a paleontologist at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology who studied the fossil, believes mosasaurs were territorial but not cannibalistic.

One mosasaur apparently ripped the head off a 16 - foot - long rival.

These bones are evidence of combat between mosasaurs — vicious marine lizards of the Cretaceous Period.

The Navesink Formation preserves many invertebrate and vertebrate species common in the Late Cretaceous near shore marine sediments, such as bivalves, brachiopods, crustaceans, teleost fish, sharks, turtles and the occasional mosasaur and dinosaur.

The southern record has scarce informative mosasaur skulls, most of them found in New Zealand.

However, in southern South America and Antarctica, mosasaur remains are especially scarce.

Hence the relevance of the new specimen, which shows a distant kinship with respect to the northern hemisphere mosasaurs.»

Use advanced tech tools to track, examine, and discover scientifically accurate creatures like mosasaurs, livyatans, and megalodons.

«In fact, ever since the discovery of whale - fall communities, researchers have suspected that similar communities may have existed even earlier than the first whales, on the sunken carcasses of ancient marine reptiles, among them plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and mosasaurs,» writes Little.

For their study, the researchers looked at three sets of fossils (now housed in museums in Denmark, England, and Texas) of widely disparate creatures from different eras: a leatherback turtle that lived about 55 million years ago, a large predator called a mosasaur that lived about 86 million years ago, and an ichthyosaur that swam the seas between 190 million and 196 million years ago.

Some ancient marine reptiles, such as the leatherback turtle Eosphargis breineri (top), the ichthyosaur (middle), and the mosasaur (bottom), had color schemes similar to modern - day sea creat

Early paleontologists found a wealth of fossils in the formation that reflect the region's watery past: swimming reptiles like plesiosaurs and mosasaurs, crocodiles and turtles, plus a handful of land - dwelling hadrosaurs.

In the leatherback turtle and the mosasaur, the pigments were concentrated on the upper surfaces of the animals» bodies.

Using H. terrasanctus as an anatomical guide, they found that it was most likely a close relative of P. problematicus — and that both were far more like modern boas and pythons than any mosasaur.

They examined this limbed creature's skull and determined that it had neither the fixed jaws of lizards nor the highly flexible ones of snakes but rather a modified, mosasaur - like gape that must represent some intermediate evolutionary step.

A new analysis of an old fossil stands to overturn the current theory that snakes evolved from the mosasaurs, huge lizards that swam the Cretaceous oceans some 144 to 165 million years ago.

Overall, comparing Vadasaurus's features with those of earlier and later pleurosaurs may provide scientists with insights about how evolution might have progressed among other, totally separate lineages of ancient creatures that also undertook the land - to - sea transition, including ichthyosaurs and mosasaurs, marine reptiles that swam the seas worldwide during large portions of the dinosaur era.

But an unusual fossil described here today at the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology meeting tells a different story — of a mosasaur spat that didn't end in anyone becoming lunch.

That, they add, makes it the first evidence of a nonlethal mosasaur - on - mosasaur attack.

Analysis of the tooth by Takuya Konishi of the University of Cincinnati in Ohio and colleagues suggests that the mosasaur was attacked by one of its own kind and of similar size.

The oceans of the late Cretaceous were dominated by giant reptiles called mosasaurs; fossilized gut contents have shown that these apex predators enjoyed munching on everything from bony fish to, on occasion, smaller mosasaurs.

Knowledge of the mosasaurs goes back to the discovery of Mosasaurus, and their fossil record is more complete than for other marine reptiles.

«Mosasaurs were getting into vicious fights with one another,» says Everhart.

Many types of marine reptile evolved during the Mesozoic, but four stand out owing to their abundance, dominance and global distribution: ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, pliosaurs and mosasaurs.

In front of me was a mosasaur with embryos — it had tiny little versions of the adults lined up in its belly,» he says.

But several other groups evolved over the course of the Mesozoic era (251 to 65 million years ago), most notably pliosaurs and mosasaurs.

At the end of the Cretaceous the mosasaurs, plesiosaurs and pliosaurs joined the dinosaurs in the roll call of another mass extinction.

In 2001, Mike Caldwell of the University of Alberta, Canada, was examining a mosasaur fossil in the Museum of Natural History in Trieste, Italy.

Mosasaurs were a new breed of marine reptile that branched off from the monitor lizard lineage.

Below it are two healed wounds of an earlier contest the mosasaur survived.

* Correction, 5 May, 3:57 p.m.: An earlier version of this story stated that mosasaurs were living 130 million years ago at the time of the earliest relatives of modern birds.

Further, if the group being studied is only known from fossil evidence (e.g., mosasaurs), then morphology is the only informative data set on phylogenetic relationships and paleobiology.

A new species of giant sea lizard (mosasaur), discovered in 66 - million - year - old rocks of Antarctica, is now the largest known top marine predator from this continent (about 33 feet long).

The marine reptiles persisted, including the ichthyosaurs in the in the Lower and Middle of the Cretaceous, the plesiosaurs throughout the Cretaceous, and the mosasaurs that dominated the Upper Cretaceous.