Dino card No. 1303 of 2,027

Ogmodirus

Say it: og-MOH-dye-rus

Name means: “swollen shin bone”1

Ate: MeatPlesiosaursLate CretaceousNot technically a dinosaur

Ogmodirus was a long-necked marine reptile that swam in the shallow seas of ancient Kansas. It was not a dinosaur, but a fierce hunter of fish and other sea creatures.1 3

Fun fact: this sea reptile swam while dinosaurs walked on land. Everyone calls them dinos, but they were a different branch of reptiles.

Lived

94 to 90 million years ago3

Late Cretaceous

Fossils found in

Kansas, USA, in the Greenhorn Limestone formation1 2

Food

Meat3

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

cool stuff

Fun facts

Ogmodirus lived about 94 to 89 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous period.1 2

The first fossil, called KUVP 441, was found in 1909 by C. Boyce in Cloud County, Kansas. It included a pelvis, limb bones, and more than 50 neck vertebrae from a young animal.1

Ogmodirus is known from a juvenile skeleton, so scientists are not sure how big adults could get.1

Some scientists think Ogmodirus belongs to the elasmosaur family, which includes Elasmosaurus, but the fossils are too incomplete to be sure.1

A second species, Ogmodirus ischiadicus, was later moved to a different genus called Styxosaurus.1

The name Ogmodirus means 'swollen shin bone', which refers to a feature of its leg bones.1

AI-made picture of Ogmodirus — An AI-made picture of how Ogmodirus 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: Ogmodirus was a dinosaur.

Truth: Ogmodirus was a plesiosaur, a marine reptile, not a dinosaur. Dinosaurs lived on land, while plesiosaurs swam in the ocean.1

For dino experts

Scientific name: Ogmodirus
Named by: Williston and Moodie 19133
Group: Plesiosaurs
Family / clade: Elasmosauridae3
Classification: Plesiosauria > Elasmosauridae > Sauropterygia3
Age of the rocks: 94 to 90 million years (Turonian)3
Rock formations: Greenhorn Limestone3
Countries: USA3
Fossil records: 1 in the Paleobiology Database3
Discovery: Ogmodirus was named by Samuel Wendell Williston and Roy Lee Moodie in 1913, based on a fossil found in Kansas in 1909.1
Still debated: Scientists debate whether Ogmodirus is a valid genus or a dubious one, because the only known skeleton is incomplete and from a juvenile.1 2

Where the facts come from

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