2023-07-19 04:00:01
In the Cretaceous era, gigantic marine reptiles ruled the oceans while dinosaurs ruled the land. A 94 million year old mosasaur has just been unearthed, revealing valuable information on the evolution of these creatures.
University of North Florida faculty member Dr. Barry Albright and his team, led by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), found this remarkable creature in the clay badlands (Clay (name feminine) is a sedimentary rock, composed largely of…) gray from the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in the south (South is a cardinal point, opposite to north.) of Utah in the United States.
Artistic representation of the Sarabosaurus dahli.
Credit: Andrey Atuchin
University of North Florida
This scientific research began almost 11 years ago when Scott Richardson, a trained volunteer, found fragments of skull (The skull is a bony or cartilaginous structure of the head, characteristic of…) and vertebrae of a mosasaur scattered on a wide slope of clay. According to Dr. Albright, these fossils are extremely rare because, 94 million years ago, the mosasaurs were still very small and in the beginning of adaptation to life (Life is the given name:) marine.
The BLM and National Parks Service team managed to recover almost 50% of the specimen during the two seasons of excavation, allowing the species to be precisely identified. Dr. Alan Titus of the BLM and his team named this new species “Sarabosaurus dahli”, in honor of Steve Dahl, a volunteer who contributed to the research .).
Mosasaurs are known to have evolved from small land creatures, similar to modern Komodo dragons, into gigantic marine predators. However, the Sarabosaurus dahli revealed a major difference: a new way of circulating blood in its brain (The brain is the main organ of the central nervous system of animals. The brain processes…).
“This discovery provides new insights into mosasaur evolution and unveils a unique cranial blood supply,” said Dr. Michael J. Polcyn, of Utrecht University, Netherlands, and Methodist University South, Dallas.
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