#simolestes

FINALLY IT'S OUT! Please welcome Lorrainosaurus keileni, a new pliosaur from France and a replacement for Simolestes keileni.

Besides the press release artwork I also did the skeletal drawing for this one. Based on the phylogeny I mixed here Simolestes characters with animals like Kronosaurus, to reflect it's new position.

My personal story with this specimen starts in 2016, when me and Sven Sachs spontaneously visited the Natural History Museum in Luxembourg. The biggest preserved piece of the lower jaw was already on display back then but with the fragments in the collection we were able to piece it together to be nearly complete. What was a box of scraps turned into the 1,4 m tool of a monster. I was very happy to be able to bring this project to a close by contributing the artwork that would accompany the paper eventually.

I wanted to show the animal with open mouth, to show the impressive teeth and jaw shape, but without the animal attacking something, so a cleaning scenario came to mind.

Oh, btw. here the paper, it's open access

Simolestes

It is midday along the edge of a sponge reef in the late Jurassic Tethys Sea, in a region that will one day become southern Europe. Rays of light filter through the surface into silty water full of plankton. A few squid-like #belemnites flit around the sponges in search of prey, accompanied by the occasional #holophagus, a lobe finned fish related to the modern coelacanth.

Slowly, a large form emerges from the murk of distant, deeper waters. the inhabitants of the reef scatter toward safety, fleeing from what might be an approaching threat. 

Though this #simolestes would indeed pose a threat at other times, his attention at the moment is not directed toward the cephalopods. Instead, he skims briefly along the water's surface, taking a few moments to expel and draw in tremendous gulps of air. 

Simolestes is a pliosaur, a member of a diverse group of marine reptiles that have patrolled the seas since the Triassic. His keen sense of smell allows him to detect prey over great distances, and his snaggle-toothed maw is well adapted for hunting slippery cephalopods.

Luckily for the residents of this particular reef, he has recently eaten, and with a few strokes of his powerful flippers, he descends back into the depths, on his way to more bountiful hunting grounds.

30" x 22" Oil on Canvas, 2017

Simolestes vorax floats nearly motionless in the gloom, her dark body cloaking her in the midnight waters of a shallow shelf sea that cleaves two ancient supercontinents apart. On a full lung, the huge pliosaur can stay like this for hours - and she will, hung between the silt bed below and the glass of the waters surface, dappled by the moonlight sinking through the water as she waits. Her two-metre long jaws are lined with the skewers of her teeth, some of them the size of railroad spikes, and each of her four muscular flippers are as large as fully grown men. She is a veritable leviathan; for now, her two ton body seems weightless, suspended in the stillness of the Jurassic night. She is patient. She will wait. She will feed by sunrise. 

Pliosaurs are a group of usually large, specialised plesiosaurs that employed ambush predation to capture large prey - usually other marine reptiles. Pliosaurs’ extreme size has made them somewhat popular with the general public, and Simolestes vorax was one of the largest, alongside species of Kronosaurus and Pliosaurus. S. vorax hails from the Callovian stage of the Jurassic, from the Oxford Clay formation of England and France, which was part of a tropical shelf sea between Laurasia and Gondwana 160 million years ago.

As ambush predators, pliosaurs’ swimming behaviour probably involved inefficient but incredibly powerful bursts of speed generated by the hydrofoils of their flippers. S. vorax may have preyed on all manner of oceanic reptiles that shared its environment, such as the crocodile-like thalattosuchians and the ubiquitous ichthyosaurs - although the discovery of cephalopod arm hooks in the stomach of one specimen indicates that large cephalopods were also part of the animal’s diet.