Dino card No. 1210 of 2,027

Morenosaurus

Say it: MOR-en-oh-SORE-us

Name means: “Moreno lizard, named after the Moreno Formation where it was found”1

Ate: MeatPlesiosaursLate CretaceousNot technically a dinosaur

Morenosaurus was a huge marine reptile that swam in the seas near California about 70 million years ago. It had a very long neck and flippers like paddles, and it was not a dinosaur!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 ago3

Late Cretaceous

Fossils found in

Panoche Hills, Fresno County, California, USA1 2

Food

Meat3

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

cool stuff

Fun facts

The skeleton of Morenosaurus was fairly complete, but it was missing the head and parts of the neck and paddles.1

The preserved part of the trunk and tail is 3.63 metres (11.9 feet) long.1

Morenosaurus lived during the Maastrichtian age, about 72 to 66 million years ago.3

The type specimen is stored at the California Institute of Technology, but the mounted skeleton is now in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.1

Morenosaurus belongs to a group called elasmosaurids, which were plesiosaurs with very long necks.1

AI-made picture of Morenosaurus — An AI-made picture of how Morenosaurus 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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Myth buster

Myth: Some people think all marine reptiles from the dinosaur age were dinosaurs.

Truth: Morenosaurus was a plesiosaur, a marine reptile, not a dinosaur. Dinosaurs lived on land.1

For dino experts

Scientific name: Morenosaurus
Named by: Welles 19433
Group: Plesiosaurs
Family / clade: Elasmosauridae3
Classification: Plesiosauria > Elasmosauridae > Sauropterygia3
Age of the rocks: 72 to 66 million years (Maastrichtian)3
Rock formations: Moreno3
Countries: USA3
Fossil records: 2 in the Paleobiology Database3
Discovery: The skeleton was found by Robert Wallace and Arthur Drescher in 1939 in the Panoche Hills, California. Samuel Welles named it Morenosaurus stocki in 1943, honoring Dr. Chester Stock.1 2
Still debated: Scientists are not sure about the total length of Morenosaurus because the head and neck are missing from the fossil.1

Where the facts come from

Morenosaurus (en.wikipedia.org)
Dinosaur Institute Collections Details | NHM (collections.nhm.org)
Morenosaurus 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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