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Pliosaurus brachydeirus is the (combinatio nova of the) type species of the genus. It was first described and named by the English paleontologist Richard Owen in 1841, as a species of the wastebasket taxon Plesiosaurus in its own subgenus Pleiosaurus, creating Plesiosaurus (Pleiosaurus) brachydeirus. [9]
Cast of "Plesiosaurus" macrocephalus found by Mary Anning, Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, Paris. Pliosauroidea is a stem-based taxon that was defined by Welles as "all taxa more closely related to Pliosaurus brachydeirus than to Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus". Pliosauridae and Rhomaleosauridae are stem-based taxa too.
Illustration of the skeletal anatomy of a Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus from Conybeare's 1824 paper that described an almost complete plesiosaur skeleton found by Mary Anning in 1823. Plesiosaurus was a moderately sized plesiosaur that grew to 2.87–3.5 m (9.4–11.5 ft) in length.
The smaller mosasaurs may have spent some time in fresh water, hunting for food. The largest mosasaur Mosasaurus hoffmannii was the apex predator of the Late Cretaceous oceans, reaching more than 11 metres (36 ft) in length and weighing up to 10 metric tons (11 short tons) in body mass. [14]
Mosasaurus fossils have been found in North and South America, Europe, Africa, Western Asia, and Antarctica. This distribution encompassed a wide range of oceanic climates including tropical, subtropical, temperate, and subpolar. Mosasaurus was a common large predator in these oceans and was positioned at the top of the food chain.
On 12 August 2011, researchers from the U.S. described a fossil of a pregnant plesiosaur found on a Kansas ranch in 1987. [11] The plesiosauroid, Polycotylus latippinus , has confirmed that these predatory marine reptiles gave birth to single, large, live offspring—contrary to other marine reptile reproduction which typically involves a large ...
Instead, they primarily relied on stratigraphic associations and Cuvier's 1808 research on the holotype skull. Thus, in-depth research on the placement of Mosasaurus was not undertaken until the discovery of more complete mosasaur fossils during the late 19th century, which reignited research on the placement of mosasaurs among squamates. [8]
Letter concerning the discovery of the 1823 Plesiosaurus, from Mary Anning. This timeline of plesiosaur research is a chronologically ordered list of important fossil discoveries, controversies of interpretation, taxonomic revisions, and cultural portrayals of plesiosaurs, an order of marine reptiles that flourished during the Mesozoic Era.