Dino card No. 1685 of 2,027

Sisteronia

Say it: sis-ter-OH-nee-uh

Name means: “Sister's own, named after the Sisteron region in France”1

Ate: MeatIchthyosaursEarly Cretaceous to Late CretaceousNot technically a dinosaur

Sisteronia was a fast-swimming marine reptile that lived in the Cretaceous seas. It had sharp teeth for catching small fish and squid. Sisteronia was an ichthyosaur, not a dinosaur, and looked a bit like a modern dolphin.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

113 to 94 million years ago3

Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous

Fossils found in

England (Gault Formation, Cambridge Greensand Member), France (Vocontian Basin), and Russia3 1

Food

Meat2

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

cool stuff

Fun facts

Sisteronia had teeth that were rectangular in cross-section, which is unusual among ichthyosaurs.2

It lived during the Albian and early Cenomanian stages of the Cretaceous, about 112 to 100 million years ago.2

Sisteronia is known from fossils found in England, France, and Russia, showing it lived in the seas of western Europe.3

This ichthyosaur belonged to the group Platypterygiinae, which were the last surviving ichthyosaurs before they went extinct.2

The name Sisteronia comes from the town of Sisteron in France, near where some of its fossils were found.1

Sisteronia had a raised process on the floor of the foramen magnum (the hole in the skull for the spinal cord), a unique feature not seen in other ichthyosaurs.2

AI-made picture of Sisteronia — An AI-made picture of how Sisteronia 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: Sisteronia
Named by: Fischer et al. 20143
Group: Ichthyosaurs
Family / clade: Ophthalmosauridae3
Classification: Ichthyosauria > Ichthyosauromorpha3
Age of the rocks: 113 to 94 million years (Albian / Cenomanian)3
Rock formations: Marnes bleues, West Melbury Marly Chalk, Gault3
Countries: United Kingdom, France, Russia3
Fossil records: 6 in the Paleobiology Database3
Discovery: Sisteronia was named by Fischer and colleagues in 2014, based on fossils from the Cambridge Greensand Member in England and the Vocontian Basin in France.3 1
Still debated: Scientists are still debating exactly how diverse late Cretaceous ichthyosaurs were, and whether Sisteronia was part of a broader European hotspot of ichthyosaur diversity.1

Where the facts come from

High Diversity in Cretaceous Ichthyosaurs from Europe Prior to Their Extinction (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
Sisteronia (en.wikipedia.org)
Sisteronia 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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