Dino card No. 1267 of 2,027

Nichollsia

Say it: nih-KOHL-sore-uh

Name means: “Nicholls' lizard, named after paleontologist Betsy Nicholls”1

Ate: MeatPlesiosaursEarly CretaceousNot technically a dinosaur

Nichollssaura was a small, fast-swimming marine reptile that lived in the sea that once covered Alberta, Canada. It was a plesiosaur, not a dinosaur, and had a long neck and four flippers for paddling through the water. This creature helps scientists fill in a big 40-million-year gap in the plesiosaur fossil record of North America.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

113 to 100 million years ago2

Early Cretaceous

Food

Meat2

Length

2.6 to 2.9 m1

based on a complete specimen

Weight

135 kg1

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

How big was it?

as long as 1.5 bicycles in a rowas long as 16 bananas end to endas heavy as 4 big dogsas heavy as 27 watermelons

How big was Nichollsia compared to YOU?

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cool stuff

Fun facts

The fossil was discovered accidentally by giant electric shovel operators in an oilsand mine. The shovel cut off some bones, but the rest of the skeleton was almost complete.1

This plesiosaur was named after Dr. Betsy Nicholls, a famous paleontologist. The first name Nichollsia was already used for a type of isopod, so scientists changed it to Nichollssaura.1

Nichollssaura had 165 gastroliths (stomach stones) inside it. The stones were smooth and round, probably swallowed to help grind food.1

The stomach stones came from rocks that were 8 to 10 million years older than the plesiosaur itself. This suggests Nichollssaura may have swum west to collect pebbles from ancient beaches.1

It lived about 110 million years ago in the Boreal Sea, a warm shallow sea that covered parts of North America.1

The holotype specimen is on display at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta, Canada.1

AI-made picture of Nichollsia — An AI-made picture of how Nichollsia 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: Nichollsia
Named by: Druckenmiller and Russell 20082
Group: Plesiosaurs
Family / clade: Leptocleididae2
Classification: Plesiosauria > Sauropterygia2
Age of the rocks: 113 to 100 million years (Albian)2
Fossil records: 1 in the Paleobiology Database2
Discovery: The specimen was found in 1994 by shovel operators Greg Fisher and Lorne Cundal at a Syncrude oilsand mine in Alberta. It was named Nichollsia borealis by Druckenmiller and Russell in 2008, but the name was changed to Nichollssaura in 2009 because Nichollsia was already taken.1 2

Where the facts come from

Nichollssaura (en.wikipedia.org)
Nichollsia 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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