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Fossils belonging to the group have been found in all continents around the world. Early mosasaurians like dolichosaurs were small long-bodied lizards that inhabited nearshore coastal and freshwater environments; the Late Cretaceous saw the rise of large marine forms, the mosasaurids , which are the clade's best-known members.
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.
The cervical vertebrae of Clidastes are also different from those in Mosasaurus by being more elongated. [ 9 ] Clidastes is most frequently recovered as one of the most basal mosasaurines, and the most basal hydropedal mosasaurine genus, being more derived than the plesiopedal Dallasaurus but less derived than later genera like Prognathodon or ...
The team initially suspected the specimen to be the oldest known Mosasaurus, but further preparation uncovered features indicating a new intermediate genus and species between Mosasaurus and the more primitive Clidastes. [1] The study, published in 2023, named the species Jormungandr walhallaensis.
The smallest-known mosasaur was Dallasaurus turneri, which was less than 1 m (3.3 ft) long. Larger mosasaurs were more typical, with many species growing longer than 4 m (13 ft). Mosasaurus hoffmannii, the largest known species reached up to 17 m (56 ft), [3] but it has been considered to be probably overestimated by Cleary et al. (2018). [4]
Tylosaurus (/ ˌ t aɪ ˈ l oʊ ˈ s ɔːr ə s /; "knob lizard" [a]) is a genus of russellosaurine mosasaur (an extinct group of predatory marine lizards) that lived about 92 to 66 million years ago during the Turonian to Maastrichtian stages of the Late Cretaceous.
The ratio between the length of the supratemporal fenestra and the total length of the skull has previously been used as an improvised measurement for mosasaur bite force, and is quite high in these genera (0.27 in Globidens dakotensis and 0.22 in Prognathodon overtoni and P. saturator) compared to other mosasaurs like Mosasaurus hoffmannii ...
It was a medium-sized mosasaur about 3–4 m (9.8–13.1 ft) long. [2] The length of the dubious H. onchognathus is difficult to tell due to the lack of remains, but was likely similar. As in other halisaurines, the flippers of Halisaurus are poorly differentiated which means that the genus lacked the hydrophalangy of more advanced mosasaurs.