Dino card No. 0137 of 2,027

Aphrosaurus

Say it: AF-roh-SORE-us

Name means: “sea foam lizard”1

Ate: MeatPlesiosaursLate CretaceousNot technically a dinosaur

Aphrosaurus was a long-necked marine reptile that swam in the Pacific Ocean near California near the end of the age of dinosaurs. It was a plesiosaur, not a dinosaur, and it glided through the water like a slow, graceful sea monster.1

Fun fact: this sea reptile swam while dinosaurs walked on land. Everyone calls them dinos, but they were a different branch of reptiles.

Lived

72 to 66 million years ago4

Late Cretaceous

Fossils found in

Moreno Formation, Fresno County, California, USA1 2

Food

Meat1 2

Length

10 m3

estimate

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

How big was it?

How long was it?

as long as 2 cars parked in a rowas long as 56 bananas end to end

How big was Aphrosaurus compared to YOU?

Just maths in your browser. Nothing is saved or sent anywhere.

cool stuff

Fun facts

Aphrosaurus lived about 70 to 66 million years ago, during the very end of the Cretaceous Period.1 2

Its name comes from Greek words meaning 'sea foam lizard'.1

The only known fossil was found in 1939 by a rancher named Frank C. Piava.1

Aphrosaurus had a deep groove on the underside of its neck bones that helped scientists tell it apart from other plesiosaurs.1

Scientists think Aphrosaurus was a slow swimmer that glided long distances, like a flying bird but underwater.1

It shared its ocean home with other plesiosaurs like Morenosaurus, Fresnosaurus, and Hydrotherosaurus, as well as many mosasaurs and sea turtles.1

AI-made picture of Aphrosaurus — An AI-made picture of how Aphrosaurus might have looked, made by a computer from what scientists know. It is a guess: the real animal may have looked different, and nobody knows its true colours.

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For dino experts

Scientific name: Aphrosaurus
Named by: Welles 19434
Group: Plesiosaurs
Family / clade: Elasmosauridae4
Classification: Plesiosauria > Elasmosauridae > Sauropterygia4
Age of the rocks: 72 to 66 million years (Maastrichtian)4
Rock formations: Moreno4
Countries: USA4
Fossil records: 1 in the Paleobiology Database4
Discovery: Samuel Welles named Aphrosaurus in 1943 based on a partial skeleton found in the Moreno Formation of California. The species name furlongi honors Eustace Furlong, a field assistant and fossil preparator at the University of California, Berkeley.1
Still debated: Scientists are not sure exactly how big Aphrosaurus grew, because only one partial skeleton has been found.1

Where the facts come from

Aphrosaurus (en.wikipedia.org)
PBDB Taxon (paleobiodb.org)
Aphrosaurus (prehistoric-wildlife.com)
Aphrosaurus in The Paleobiology Database (CC BY 4.0): age, places, rock formations, classification.

Every fact on this page has a number that points to its source. If we got something wrong, sorry, we are dino fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.

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