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Restoration Detail of Thalassomedon skull at the American Museum of Natural History. Thalassomedon is among the largest elasmosaurids, with the holotype measuring 10.86 metres (35.6 ft) long and weighing more than 4.44 metric tons (4.89 short tons).
Elasmosaurus was the first major fossil discovery in Kansas (and the largest from there at the time), and marked the beginning of a fossil collecting rush that sent thousands of fossils from Kansas to prominent museums on the American east coast. [3]
A photograph of a front flipper of Plesioelasmosaurus, taken in the 1930s by George F. Sternberg, was captioned as belonging to "a large plesiosaur, which would have measured from 40 to 60 feet in length" (12.2 to 18.3 m).
Life restoration. Zarafasaura was first named by Peggy Vincent, Nathalie Bardet, Xabier Pereda Suberbiola, Baâdi Bouya, Mbarek Amaghzaz and Saïd Meslouh in 2011 and the type species is Zarafasaura oceanis.
Albertonectes was first described and named by Tai Kubo, Mark T. Mitchell and Donald M. Henderson in 2012 and the type species is Albertonectes vanderveldei.The generic name is derived from Alberta, in reference to the Canadian province where the holotype was found, and from Greek nectes, meaning "swimmer", a common suffix for genus names of plesiosaurians.
Styxosaurus was a large elasmosaur, with a long neck measuring about 5.25 metres (17.2 ft) in total. [4] [7] The S. snowii specimen NJSM 15435 was reported to measure 10 m (33 ft), though it lacks the skull and the frontmost neck vertebrae. [8]
One fossil in particular marked the start of the Bone Wars between the rival paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. Cope's Elasmosaurus with its head on the tail and lacking hindlimbs. In 1867, physician Theophilus Turner near Fort Wallace in Kansas uncovered a plesiosaur skeleton, which he donated to Cope. [25]
On 12 August 2011, researchers from the U.S. described a fossil of a pregnant plesiosaur found on a Kansas ranch in 1987. [10] 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 ...