#pliosaur

It's Fossil Friday!

Here you have Attenborosaurus catching himself a meal :D

his week's #Paleostream flocking was themed around the Walking With series of palaeontology documentaries to honour the last Ben Bartlett who passed yesterday

we sketched Ornithocheirus, Brontoscorpio, Liopleurodon, and Koolasuchus

Approximately 190 million years ago, a great float of Attenborosaurus swiftly navigate their pelagic environment in their hunt for fish. - Attenborosaurus is an extinct and mainly piscivorous marine reptile that existed during the early Jurassic. It is a comparatively primitive pliosaurid, closer related to the short-necked plesiosaurian marine reptiles than actual plesiosaurs. Originally, the holotype specimen was thought to be a plesiosaur in 1881, but was assigned to the Attenborosaurus genus by Robert T. Bakker in 1993, thus becoming its type species- A. conybeari. -

Megacephalosaurus eulerti was a one of the last of the pliosaurs – a group of short-necked big-headed plesiosaurs – living during the Late Cretaceous (~93 million years ago) in what is now the Midwestern United States, a region that at that time was covered by the Western Interior Seaway.

Although known only from fossil skulls and a few neck bones, based on the proportions of related pliosaurs it probably reached around 9m long (~30') with its 1.75m (~5'9") head alone making up 20-25% of that measurement.

Its elongated jaws were lined with pointed conical teeth, and pits in the bones of its snout may have housed a complex sensory system, possibly giving it the ability to detect the movements or even bioelectric fields of nearby prey.

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