{"id":57975,"date":"2024-12-11T09:39:17","date_gmt":"2024-12-11T09:39:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/historyland.nl\/?p=57975"},"modified":"2025-01-23T13:10:18","modified_gmt":"2025-01-23T13:10:18","slug":"deutsch-mosasaurus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/historyland.nl\/en\/info\/deutsch-mosasaurus\/","title":{"rendered":"Mosasaurus"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Mosasaurus refers to a group of extinct monitor lizard-like marine reptiles adapted to life in water (marine environments); their ancestors lived on land.<br \/>\nThis is a textbook example of evolution. During the Late Cretaceous (98\u201366 million years ago), highly diverse forms evolved, adapting to open oceans, coastal waters, or specializing as \u201cshell crushers,\u201d consuming bivalves with their nut-shaped teeth. There was also a general evolutionary trend: most newly emerged species became progressively larger over the course of the Cretaceous. All species were viviparous.<br \/>\n<em>Skeletal remains of Platecarpus<\/em>, a mosasaur that lived approximately 88\u201380 million years ago, have been found in the sediments of the North American Interior Seaway, which existed during the Cretaceous, also known as the &#8220;Ocean of Kansas.&#8221; Although <em>Platecarpus<\/em> is a relatively early mosasaur, it already displays the typical body form: streamlined, with fin-like limbs and a vertebral column consisting of 119 vertebrae. As an \u201cearly\u201d mosasaur, <em>Platecarpus<\/em> was relatively modest in size, measuring 4\u20136 meters. With its pointed teeth, it likely fed primarily on belemnites, ammonites, and fish.<br \/>\nThe namesake of the mosasaur group is <em>Mosasaurus hoffmanni<\/em>. This species became famous as two skulls from St. Pietersberg near Maastricht were studied and described by European scholars as early as the 18th century. <em>Mosasaurus hoffmanni<\/em> lived at the end of the Cretaceous, about 66 million years ago, and could reach lengths of up to 17 meters\u2014nearly three times the size of <em>Platecarpus<\/em>. The teeth of <em>Mosasaurus hoffmanni<\/em> were formidable, and large sea turtles as well as other (smaller) mosasaurs were likely prey.<br \/>\n<em>Mosasaurus hoffmanni<\/em> had a trans-Atlantic distribution and went extinct along with the dinosaurs as a result of the environmental catastrophe triggered by the impact of an asteroid marking the end of the Cretaceous.<br \/>\nThis skeleton of <em>Platecarpus tympaniticus<\/em> was excavated in 2020 in Gove County, Kansas, USA, and is 95% complete, consisting of original skeletal parts with a few missing elements modeled. The skeleton includes 7 cervical vertebrae, 20 thoracic vertebrae, 5 sacral vertebrae, and 87 caudal vertebrae.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mosasaurus refers to a group of extinct monitor lizard-like marine reptiles adapted to life in water (marine environments); their ancestors lived on land. This is a textbook example of evolution. During the Late Cretaceous (98\u201366 million years ago), highly diverse forms evolved, adapting to open oceans, coastal waters, or specializing as \u201cshell crushers,\u201d consuming bivalves [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":58149,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[278],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-info"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/historyland.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/historyland.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/historyland.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/historyland.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/historyland.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/historyland.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57975\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/historyland.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/historyland.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/historyland.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/historyland.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}