Dino card No. 1028 of 2,027

Leninia

Say it: len-IN-ee-uh

Name means: “named after Vladimir Lenin, because the museum where the fossil is kept is in the Lenin Memorial and Lenin school complex in Ulyanovsk, Russia”1

Ate: MeatIchthyosaursEarly CretaceousNot technically a dinosaur

Leninia was a marine reptile that lived in the Early Cretaceous seas, not a dinosaur. It had huge eyes and probably dove deep to hunt for fish and squid.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

121 to 120 million years ago3

Early Cretaceous

Fossils found in

Kriushi village, on the banks of the Volga River in western Russia1 3

Food

Meat2

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

cool stuff

Fun facts

Only part of the skull was found, about 45 centimetres (18 inches) long. Scientists think the whole skull was between 65 and 90 centimetres (26 to 35 inches) long.1

Leninia had one of the largest scleral rings (the bony ring that supports the eye) of any ichthyosaur. Only Baptanodon and the giant Temnodontosaurus had bigger ones.1

Its skull bones form a star-shaped pattern, which is why its species name is stellans, meaning 'shining' or 'star-like'.1

Leninia lived about 119 to 113 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous Period.1

It is one of the latest-living members of the ophthalmosaurine group, which were deep-diving ichthyosaurs with very large eyes.1

The fossil was discovered in 2012 in a limestone nodule on the banks of the Volga River, near the town of Kriushi.1

AI-made picture of Leninia — An AI-made picture of how Leninia 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: Leninia
Named by: Fischer et al. 20133
Group: Ichthyosaurs
Family / clade: Ophthalmosauridae3
Classification: Ichthyosauria > Ichthyosauromorpha3
Age of the rocks: 121 to 120 million years (Aptian)3
Countries: Russia3
Fossil records: 1 in the Paleobiology Database3
Discovery: Leninia was named in 2013 by Valentin Fischer and colleagues. The only known fossil is a partial skull found in 2012 on the Volga River banks in Russia.1 3
Still debated: Scientists are not sure exactly how long the whole animal was, because only a piece of the skull has been found.1

Where the facts come from

Leninia (en.wikipedia.org)
PBDB Taxon (paleobiodb.org)
Leninia 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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