Dino card No. 0953 of 2,027

Keilhauia

Say it: kile-HOW-ee-uh

Name means: “Keilhau's reptile”1

Ate: MeatIchthyosaursEarly CretaceousNot technically a dinosaur

Keilhauia was a dolphin-like marine reptile that lived in the Early Cretaceous, about 145 million years ago. It had large eyes and a long snout, and swam in the shallow seas near what is now Norway. It was about as long as a small car!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

143 to 137 million years ago3

Early Cretaceous

Fossils found in

Svalbard, Norway1

Food

Meat1 3

Length

3.8 to 4.3 m1

estimate based on comparisons to related species

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

How big was it?

as long as 2.5 bicycles in a rowas long as 24 bananas end to end

How big was Keilhauia compared to YOU?

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cool stuff

Fun facts

Keilhauia is known from only one fossil, discovered in 2010 on the island of Spitsbergen.1

Its species name, nui, comes from the acronym of a Norwegian youth environmental organization called Natur og Ungdom.1

It had a wide top end of its ilium (hip bone) and a short ischiopubis compared to its thigh bone, which helps scientists tell it apart from other ichthyosaurs.1

Keilhauia is the most complete ichthyosaur known from the Berriasian age, the very beginning of the Cretaceous Period.1

Its pelvic girdle is the most complete one ever found from the Cretaceous Period.2

It lived in a shallow sea with an oxygen-poor seafloor, where cold seeps supported many invertebrates like ammonites and brachiopods.1

AI-made picture of Keilhauia — An AI-made picture of how Keilhauia 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: Keilhauia
Named by: Delsett et al. 20173
Group: Ichthyosaurs
Family / clade: Ophthalmosauridae3
Classification: Ichthyosauria > Ichthyosauromorpha3
Age of the rocks: 143 to 137 million years (Berriasian)3
Rock formations: Agardhfjellet3
Countries: Svalbard3
Fossil records: 1 in the Paleobiology Database3
Discovery: The first fossil of Keilhauia was found in 2010 by the Spitsbergen Mesozoic Research Group on Svalbard, Norway. Scientists named it in 2017 after the Norwegian geologist Baltazar Mathias Keilhau.1
Still debated: Scientists are unsure exactly how Keilhauia is related to other ichthyosaurs because its skull is not well preserved, so its family tree position is uncertain.1

Where the facts come from

Keilhauia (en.wikipedia.org)
A New Ophthalmosaurid (Ichthyosauria) from Svalbard, Norway, and Evolution of the Ichthyopterygian Pelvic Girdle (eprints.soton.ac.uk)
Keilhauia 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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