Marine Reptiles of the Past

[Spalea]

" Full-size Mosasaurus hoffmani model. ?

Can you even imagine what this looked like when it was swimming through the oceans?
Mosasaurus ("lizard of the Meuse River") is the type genus of the mosasaurs, an extinct group of aquatic squamate reptiles. The genus lived about 82 to 66 million years ago during the Campanian and Maastrichtian stages of the Late Cretaceous. The earliest fossils known to science were found as skulls in a chalk quarry near the Dutch city of Maastricht in the late 1700s, which were initially thought to have been the bones of crocodiles or whales. One particular skull discovered sometime around 1780, which was seized during the French Revolutionary Wars for its scientific value and transported to Paris, was famously nicknamed the "great animal of Maastricht". In 1808, naturalist Georges Cuvier concluded that it belonged to a giant marine lizard with similarities to monitor lizards but otherwise unlike any animal known today. This concept was revolutionary at the time and helped support the then-developing ideas of extinction. However, Cuvier did not designate a scientific name for the new animal; this task was completed by William Daniel Conybeare in 1822 when he named it the Mosasaurus in reference to its origin in fossil deposits near the Meuse River.
Traditional interpretations have estimated the maximum length of Mosasaurus to be up to 17.6 meters (58 ft), making it one of the largest mosasaur genera of all time. "

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