Researchers have identified a new species of mosasaur - a real 'monster' that lived in our seas eighty million years ago
He is about to end up run over, his mother saves himResearchers at the University of Cincinnati have identified a new species of mosasaur - a real 'monster' that lived in our seas eighty million years ago.
A new species of Kansas was discovered mosasauro: Ectenosaurus everhartorum. It is a marine reptile of enormous proportions, the size of a school bus, which inhabited Earth's oceans during the Cretaceous Era - a contemporary of Tyrannosaurus rex. The prehistoric oceans were therefore not a safe place to swim or to live: these huge animals represented a real threat to fish and other marine animals. The specimen in question was discovered in the late 70s in Logan County, Kansas. The bones of the skull have unique and different characteristics compared to other specimens of mosasaur (all belonging to a single species called Ectenosaurus clidastoides), and this has led to think of a new species.
The mosasaur is one of the prehistoric animals that has been known for the longest time: the first fossils of this species, in fact, were found in the Netherlands half a century before the term 'dinosaur' began to be used (we are at the beginning of the XNUMXth century century). Then, after the American Civil War, mosasaur fossils began to be found also in some areas of the United States: the most important American paleontologists, Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, began to study the fossils dating back to the Cretaceous Era found in Kansas. , which soon became a well-known place around the world for the search for mosasaur skeletons.
(Read also: Extinction of the dinosaurs: it was really the fault of an asteroid that caused a huge tsunami)
Over the decades, generations of experts have made a stop in Kansas to study this species and its fossil specimens, now on display in museums around the world. Up to now, about 1.500 specimens of mosasaur have been found: if at first it was believed that they all belonged to a single species, now the observations of the experts have led to a division into two different species.
The researchers dedicated this incredible discovery to Dale Russell, a Canadian paleontologist who has contributed significantly to paleontology in North America with his work. However, the name given to the 'new' mosasaur takes up the surname Everhart: Pamela and Mike Everhart are a married couple from Kansas and have spent more than thirty years making exploratory and research trips in Smoky Hill Chalk - a particularly affluent area. of prehistoric fossils - and sharing the found mosasaur fossils with museums.
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Fonte: Canadian Journal of Earth Science
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