Dino card No. 0789 of 2,027

Hastanectes

Say it: HASS-tan-NEK-tees

Name means: “spear swimmer”3

Ate: MeatPlesiosaursEarly CretaceousNot technically a dinosaur

Hastanectes was a plesiosaur, a marine reptile that lived in the seas around what is now England and Germany. It had a long neck, flippers, and a mouth full of teeth to catch fish. It swam in warm, shallow waters during the Early Cretaceous period.3 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

139 to 133 million years ago3

Early Cretaceous

Fossils found in

United Kingdom (England) and Germany (Nordrhein-Westfalen)3

Food

Meat3

Length

4 to 5 m2

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 5 dogs nose to tailas long as 28 bananas end to end

How big was Hastanectes compared to YOU?

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cool stuff

Fun facts

Hastanectes was named in 2013 by scientists Benson, Ketchum, Naish, and Turner.3 1

Its name means 'spear swimmer' in Greek, because of its long, pointed snout.3

Hastanectes lived about 139 to 132 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous.3

It was originally thought to be a species of Cimoliasaurus, another plesiosaur.1

Fossils of Hastanectes have been found in the Wadhurst Clay Formation of England and the Bückeberg Formation of Germany.3

Scientists are unsure if Hastanectes belongs to the plesiosaur family Leptocleididae or the pliosaur family Pliosauridae.3 1

AI-made picture of Hastanectes — An AI-made picture of how Hastanectes 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: Hastanectes
Named by: Benson et al. 20133
Group: Plesiosaurs
Family / clade: Leptocleididae3
Classification: Plesiosauria > Sauropterygia3
Age of the rocks: 139 to 133 million years (Berriasian / Valanginian)3
Rock formations: Wadhurst Clay, Bückeberg3
Countries: United Kingdom, Germany3
Fossil records: 6 in the Paleobiology Database3
Discovery: Hastanectes was first named in 2013 by a team of scientists who re-examined old fossils that had been called Cimoliasaurus valdensis since 1889. The fossils came from the Wadhurst Clay of England.1
Still debated: Scientists still debate whether Hastanectes is a leptocleidid plesiosaur or a pliosaur, because its fossils share features of both groups.3 1

Where the facts come from

Hastanectes (en.wikipedia.org)
Hastanectes (nl.wikipedia.org)
Hastanectes 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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