Skeleton

17' L x 2.5' W
[ 5m L x .7m W ]

Skull

19" L x 8" W
[ 46cm L x 20cm W ]

(Late Cretaceous, Lane County, KA)

This specimen is highly detailed with an excellent three-dimensional skull including internal structures. Top predators of the world’s oceans for the last 20 million years of the Cretaceous period, mosasaurs were an offshoot of the monitor lizard group, fully adapted to a marine life. Some of them were giants.

In the Kansas chalk from which this specimen was collected, Platecarpus, Clidastes, and Tylosaurus were the most common. Thriving on a diet of fish, pterosaurs, ammonites, and smaller mosasaurs, the success of the mosasaurs was so complete, they even suppressed the evolution of large sharks until their demise at the close of the Cretaceous period.

An interesting anatomical feature of the mosasaurs is the existence of teeth in the palate (pterygoid) of the skull. These teeth were arranged in two rows and were strongly curved. Its prey was only going one direction once it was in the mouth, and that was down the hatch. Mosasaurs also had very flexible skulls, and their lower jaws even had an additional point of flex just behind the dentary. Superbly suited to their environment, had mosasaurs survived the Cretaceous extinction, swimming in today’s oceans would be a much more dangerous affair.

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