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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.
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]
An 1854 depiction of Mosasaurus in Crystal Palace Park. One of the earliest paleoart depictions of Mosasaurus is a life-size concrete sculpture constructed by natural history sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins between 1852 and 1854 as part of the collection of sculptures of prehistoric animals on display at the Crystal Palace Park in London.
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]
The subfamily is generally recognised as containing two subdivisions, the tribes Globidensini (Globidens and its closest relatives) and Mosasaurini (Mosasaurus and its closest relatives). A third tribe, the Prognathodontini ( Prognathodon and its closest relatives, such as Plesiotylosaurus ), is also used on occasion. [ 6 ] "
Bell proposed that the Mosasaurini should be abandoned and that all members of the tribe should be incorporated into the Plotosaurini. While other scientists agree that a tribe containing Mosasaurus should be monophyletic, they argue that Mosasaurini should be the valid tribe. For example, in a 2012 study, Aaron LeBlanc, Caldwell, and Bardet ...
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 ...
Mosasauroidea is a superfamily of extinct marine lizards that existed during the Late Cretaceous.Basal members of this group consist of small semiaquatic forms with terrestrial limbs ("plesiopedal"), while laters members include larger fully aquatic paddle-limbed ("hydropedal") forms commonly known as mosasaurs. [3]