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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.
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. [5]
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]
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.
This list of plesiosaurs is a comprehensive listing of all genera that have ever been included in the order Plesiosauria, excluding purely vernacular terms.The list includes all commonly accepted genera, but also genera that are now considered invalid, doubtful (nomen dubium), or were not formally published (nomen nudum), as well as junior synonyms of more established names, and genera that ...
Plesiosaurus macrocephalus. Sinemurian [5] Sinemurian [5] Sinemurian [5] Plesiosaurus longirostris. Toarcian [5] Toarcian [5] Toarcian [5] Skeletal mount of Hauffiosaurus longirostris: Pliosaurus brachydeirus. Early Kimmeridgian [15] Early Kimmeridgian [15] Kimmeridgian, [5] Early Kimmeridgian [15] Life restoration of Pliosaurus brachydeirus ...
Life restoration of the mosasaur Hainosaurus feeding on a cephalopod. This timeline of mosasaur research is a chronologically ordered list of important fossil discoveries, controversies of interpretation, and taxonomic revisions of mosasaurs, a group of giant marine lizards that lived during the Late Cretaceous Epoch. Although mosasaurs went ...
Plesiosaurs were themselves prey for other carnivores, as shown by bite marks left by a shark that have been discovered on a fossilized plesiosaur fin [87] and the fossilized remains of a mosasaur's stomach contents that are thought to be the remains of a plesiosaur.