Dino card No. 0417 of 2,027

Chubutinectes

Say it: choo-BOO-tin-ECK-teez

Name means: “Chubut swimmer”2

Ate: MeatPlesiosaursLate CretaceousNot technically a dinosaur

Chubutinectes was a long-necked marine reptile that swam in warm, shallow seas near what is now Argentina. It was not a dinosaur, but a plesiosaur, a type of ocean predator with flippers like a sea turtle.2 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 ago2

Late Cretaceous

Fossils found in

Chubut Province, Argentina2 1

Food

Meat2

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

cool stuff

Fun facts

Chubutinectes lived about 67 million years ago, near the very end of the Age of Dinosaurs.1

It is one of the few plesiosaurs from the Southern Hemisphere whose skeleton after the head is well known.1

Its bones were found in the La Colonia Formation, which was once a warm, shallow sea with limited water flow.1

Scientists used tiny fossils called microfossils to figure out how old the rocks were where Chubutinectes was found.1

Chubutinectes had a special bone in its shoulder called a coracoid with a heart-shaped hole, which helped scientists tell it apart from other plesiosaurs.1

Its arm bone, the humerus, had a back part that ended in an extra bump, a unique feature.1

AI-made picture of Chubutinectes — An AI-made picture of how Chubutinectes 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: Chubutinectes
Named by: O'Gorman et al. 20232
Group: Plesiosaurs
Family / clade: Elasmosauridae2
Classification: Plesiosauria > Elasmosauridae > Sauropterygia2
Age of the rocks: 72 to 66 million years (Maastrichtian)2
Rock formations: La Colonia2
Countries: Argentina2
Fossil records: 1 in the Paleobiology Database2
Discovery: Chubutinectes was named in 2023 by paleontologist Jose Patricio O'Gorman and his team. The only known skeleton was collected from the La Colonia Formation in Chubut Province, Argentina.2 1
Still debated: Scientists are still debating exactly how Chubutinectes is related to other plesiosaurs, especially the Weddellonectia group.1

Where the facts come from

A new elasmosaurid (Sauropterygia, Plesiosauria) from the upper levels of the La Colonia Formation (upper Maastrichtian), Chubut Province, Argentina (ri.conicet.gov.ar)
Chubutinectes 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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