Jakarta –
Scientists in Japan discovered the almost complete remains of an ancient sea monster the size of a white shark. In its past, this species was most likely a terror of the seas.
The animal, which researchers have named the blue dragon, has an unusual body shape that differentiates it from its extinct relatives. The prehistoric predator was unlike any other living creature.
The fossil is known to be around 72 million years old. He was found along the Aridagawa River in Wakayama Prefecture on Honshu Island.
He belonged to a species of mosasaur that had never been seen before. For your information, mosasaurs are a group of air-breathing aquatic reptiles and were top marine predators during the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago).
“These astonishing remains are the most complete mosasaur fossils ever found in Japan and the Pacific Northwest, the researchers wrote in a statement,” the researchers wrote as quoted detikInet from Live Science.
In this new study published December 11 in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, the researchers named the new mosasaur Megapterygius wakayamaensis.
The genus Megapterygius, translated as big-winged. This name is because the creature’s rear fins are very large. Meanwhile, the species name wakayamaensis refers to the prefecture where it was found.
The team nicknamed the creature Wakayama Soryu. Soryu is a blue water dragon from Japanese mythology. Mosasaurus had a similar body shape and there was very little variation between species. But M. wakayamaensis was something strange, which surprised scientists.
“I thought I was pretty familiar with mosasaurs. But now I know it’s something I’ve never seen before,” said study lead author Takuya Konishi, a vertebrate paleontologist at Cincinnati University.
Like other mosasaurs, M. wakayamaensis had a dolphin-like body with four paddle-like fins, an alligator-shaped snout, and a long tail. However, it also has a dorsal fin like a shark or dolphin. This is not seen in other mosasaur species.
However, what confused the researchers was the size of the new mosasaur’s rear fins, which were even longer than its front fins. Not only is this a first for a mosasaur, but it is also extremely rare for all living and extinct aquatic species.
Nearly all swimming animals have their largest fins on the front of their bodies, which help them navigate the water. Having larger fins on the rear of the body would be like driving a car using the rear wheels rather than the front wheels, which would make it more difficult to turn quickly.
“We lack modern analogues that have body morphology like this, from fish to penguins to turtles. None have four large fins that they use together with the tail fin,” said Konishi.
The researchers suspect that, instead of using their rear flippers to turn, M. wakayamaensis points them up or down to quickly dive down or up, which may have helped them become adept hunters.
The dorsal fin could have made it easier for the creature to turn, which might have counteracted the extra resistance of the rear fin, they added.
“This opens up a wealth of information that challenges our understanding of how mosasaurs swam,” Konishi said.
M. wakayamaensis is almost the same size as the great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias), which is about 4.9 meters long. However, other species can grow up to 17 m.
Mosasaurs appeared about 100 million years ago and died out about 66 million years ago along with the nonavian dinosaurs after a large asteroid hit Earth.
For the last 20 million years of its existence, this fearsome sea lizard was the aquatic equivalent of the Tyrannosaurus rex and was at the top of the food chain, due in part to the disappearance of other top marine predators such as ichthyosaurs and pliosaurs.
Watch the video “Fossil Appearance of a Dinosaur that Extinct 90 Million Years Ago”
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2024-01-10 13:00:10
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