#plesiousaur

It’s been a while.

FILTER FEEDING ft. the plesiosaur Morturneria seymourensis, and the cretaceous filter feeding fish genus Rhinconichthys. What I could find on Morturneria is that people currently think it took scoops of the sea floor and filtered out the small animals between their downwards-angled teeth. I... Feel like there’s easier things to filter than mouthfuls of mud- all whilst risking your precious filtering teeth versus seabed rocks and ambush predators. If you can filter feed, why not go take a big gulp of some krill or small shoal fish? Of course size could be an issue- I looked all over and couldn’t find anything on their size: just that they were originally considered a juvenile of something else. So I guess they’re ‘small’ by plesiosaur standards? Which could mean a lot of things. Either way I got to have fun with rubbery necked fat reptiles. <3

In 1987, Charles Bonner discovered the fossilised bones of a large sea reptile on his family ranch. It was a flipper-limbed plesiosaur, probably Polycotylus, and one of many such fossils recovered from Logan County in Kansas. But this specimen was special – there was a smaller one inside it. This plesiosaur was pregnant. (via Not Exactly Rocket Science)