Dino card No. 1418 of 2,027

Phantomosaurus

Say it: fan-TOH-moh-SORE-us

Name means: “phantom lizard”1

Ate: MeatIchthyosaursMiddle TriassicNot technically a dinosaur

Phantomosaurus was a marine reptile that swam in the seas during the Triassic Period. It had a long tail and flippers to glide through the water like a sea monster.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

247 to 241 million years ago3

Middle Triassic

Fossils found in

Karlstadt, southern Germany3 1

Food

Meat1

Length

6 m1

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

How big was it?

How long was it?

as long as 6 dogs nose to tailas long as 33 bananas end to end

How big was Phantomosaurus compared to YOU?

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cool stuff

Fun facts

Phantomosaurus is known from a partial skull, lower jaw, vertebrae, ribs, and a hind fin.1

Its lower jaw is about 40 cm long and full of sharp, cone-shaped teeth for catching fish.1

The hind fin was very long and slender, with a long femur, tibia and fibula, which helped it generate lift in the water.1

The vertebrae have two hollows on each centrum, possibly to help the animal float more easily.1

Its braincase is very primitive and looks more like early reptiles such as Youngina than other ichthyosaurs.1

Scientists first thought Phantomosaurus was a species of Shastasaurus, but later studies gave it its own genus.1

Phantomosaurus lived about 247 to 241 million years ago, during the Middle Triassic.3

AI-made picture of Phantomosaurus — An AI-made picture of how Phantomosaurus 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: Phantomosaurus
Named by: Maisch and Matzke 20003
Group: Ichthyosaurs
Family / clade: Cymbospondylidae3
Classification: Ichthyosauria > Ichthyosauromorpha3
Age of the rocks: 247 to 241 million years ()3
Countries: Germany3
Fossil records: 1 in the Paleobiology Database3
Discovery: The fossils were found in 1965 in southern Germany. In 1997, Sander named it as a species of Shastasaurus, but in 2000 Maisch and Matzke gave it its own genus, Phantomosaurus.1
Still debated: Scientists still debate whether classifying ichthyosaurs based on braincase structure is accurate, because few complete braincases of early ichthyosaurs have been found.1

Where the facts come from

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