Dino card No. 1386 of 2,027

Parrassaurus

Say it: par-ah-SORE-us

Name means: “Parras lizard, after the Parras Basin in Mexico”3

Ate: MeatIchthyosaursLate Jurassic to Early CretaceousNot technically a dinosaur

Parrassaurus was a fast-swimming marine reptile that lived in the warm seas of Mexico during the Late Jurassic. It looked a bit like a dolphin but was actually an ichthyosaur, not a dinosaur. With its long snout and big eyes, it was a skilled hunter of fish and squid.1 2

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

Lived

145 to 143 million years ago3

Late Jurassic to Early Cretaceous

Fossils found in

Coahuila, northern Mexico (La Caja Formation)1 2

Food

Meat3

Length

5 m2

estimate based on the type specimen

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

How big was it?

How long was it?

as long as 5 dogs nose to tailas long as 28 bananas end to end

How big was Parrassaurus compared to YOU?

Just maths in your browser. Nothing is saved or sent anywhere.

cool stuff

Fun facts

Parrassaurus had an extremely long snout in front of its nostrils, which helped it snap up prey.1

Its skull had a unique feature: the opening for the nostril was split into two parts by a bone from the upper jaw.1

This ichthyosaur belonged to a group called ophthalmosaurids, which had very large eyes.2

Parrassaurus is only known from one nearly complete skeleton, found on a ranch in Coahuila.3 1

It lived about 145 million years ago, at the very end of the Jurassic Period.3

Parrassaurus was named in 2021, making it a relatively new discovery for scientists.3

AI-made picture of Parrassaurus — An AI-made picture of how Parrassaurus 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: Parrassaurus
Named by: Barrientos-Lara and Alvarado-Ortega 20213
Group: Ichthyosaurs
Family / clade: Ophthalmosauridae3
Classification: Ichthyosauria > Ichthyosauromorpha3
Age of the rocks: 145 to 143 million years (Tithonian)3
Rock formations: La Caja3
Countries: Mexico3
Fossil records: 1 in the Paleobiology Database3
Discovery: Parrassaurus was named in 2021 by paleontologists Jair Israel Barrientos-Lara and Jesús Alvarado-Ortega based on a skeleton found in the La Caja Formation of Coahuila, Mexico.3 1
Still debated: Scientists are still debating how Parrassaurus is related to other ichthyosaurs, especially other platypterygiines from North America.1

Where the facts come from

A new Tithonian ophthalmosaurid ichthyosaur from Coahuila in northeastern Mexico (exa.ai)
Parrassaurus (en.wikipedia.org)
Parrassaurus 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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