Dino card No. 1718 of 2,027

Stratesaurus

Say it: STRAY-tuh-SORE-us

Name means: “pavement lizard”3

Ate: MeatPlesiosaursEarly JurassicNot technically a dinosaur

Stratesaurus was a small, fast-swimming marine reptile that lived in the shallow seas of what is now England. It used its four flippers to paddle through the water and hunt for small fish and squid.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

201 to 200 million years ago3

Early Jurassic

Fossils found in

Street, Somerset, United Kingdom3 1

Food

Meat2

Length

2 m2

estimated

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

How big was it?

as long as 4 house cats nose to tailas long as 11 bananas end to end

How big was Stratesaurus compared to YOU?

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cool stuff

Fun facts

Stratesaurus is one of the oldest known plesiosaurs, living about 200 million years ago.1

Its skull was only 18 centimetres (7 inches) long, making it one of the smallest plesiosaurs.1

Stratesaurus had forward-leaning teeth in the front of its mouth, which may have helped it catch small, slippery prey.2

It lived alongside another small plesiosaur called Thalassiodracon, but they ate different foods to avoid competition.2

Fossils of Stratesaurus were first thought to belong to another plesiosaur, Thalassiodracon hawkinsii.2

AI-made picture of Stratesaurus — An AI-made picture of how Stratesaurus 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: Stratesaurus
Named by: Benson et al. 20123
Group: Plesiosaurs
Family / clade: Plesiosauria3
Classification: Plesiosauria > Sauropterygia3
Age of the rocks: 201 to 200 million years (Hettangian)3
Rock formations: Blue Lias3
Countries: United Kingdom3
Fossil records: 1 in the Paleobiology Database3
Discovery: Stratesaurus was named in 2012 by Roger Benson, Mark Evans, and Patrick Druckenmiller based on a skull and partial skeleton found in Street, Somerset, UK.3 1
Still debated: Scientists are not sure exactly how Stratesaurus is related to other early plesiosaurs, because its fossils are very old and incomplete.2

Where the facts come from

High Diversity, Low Disparity and Small Body Size in Plesiosaurs (Reptilia, Sauropterygia) from the Triassic, Jurassic Boundary | PLOS One (journals.plos.org)
Stratesaurus (UK Lower Jurassic plesiosaur) anatomy (dml.reptilis.net)
Stratesaurus 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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