Dino card No. 1789 of 2,027

Thaumatodracon

Say it: thaw-MAT-oh-DRAK-on

Name means: “wonder dragon”1

Ate: MeatPlesiosaursEarly JurassicNot technically a dinosaur

Thaumatodracon was a short-necked plesiosaur that lived in the Early Jurassic seas. It had a big head and four flippers to swim after fish and squid. This marine reptile was a top predator in its ocean home.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

200 to 193 million years ago4

Early Jurassic

Fossils found in

Lyme Regis, Dorset, England, UK1

Food

Meat4

Length

6.5 m2 3

estimate based on comparison with other rhomaleosaurids

Weight

2 tonnes2

estimate

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

How big was it?

How long was it?

How heavy was it?

as heavy as 1.5 cars

as long as 6 dogs nose to tailas long as 36 bananas end to endas heavy as 67 big dogsas heavy as 400 watermelons

How big was Thaumatodracon compared to YOU?

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cool stuff

Fun facts

Thaumatodracon is known from a partial skeleton that includes a complete skull, lower jaw, and neck bones.1

It was named in 2017 by scientists Adam Smith and Ricardo Araújo.4

The species name wiedenrothi honors Kurt Wiedenroth, the amateur fossil hunter who found the specimen in 1969.1

Thaumatodracon belongs to a group called Rhomaleosauridae, which were short-necked plesiosaurs with large heads.4

It lived during the Sinemurian stage of the Early Jurassic, about 199 to 193 million years ago.4

The fossil was found in the Black Ven Mudstone Member of the Charmouth Mudstone Formation in Lyme Bay.1

AI-made picture of Thaumatodracon — An AI-made picture of how Thaumatodracon 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: Thaumatodracon
Named by: Smith and Araújo 20174
Group: Plesiosaurs
Family / clade: Rhomaleosauridae4
Classification: Plesiosauria > Sauropterygia4
Age of the rocks: 200 to 193 million years (Sinemurian)4
Countries: United Kingdom4
Fossil records: 1 in the Paleobiology Database4
Discovery: The only known fossil of Thaumatodracon was discovered in early 1969 by amateur fossil hunter Kurt Wiedenroth on the coast between Lyme Regis and Charmouth, England. It was later bought by the Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum Hannover and studied by Smith and Araújo, who named it in 2017.1
Still debated: Scientists are not sure if the two triangular processes on the base of the skull are real features or just damage from fossilization.1

Where the facts come from

Thaumatodracon wiedenrothi, a morphometrically and stratigraphically intermediate new rhomaleosaurid plesiosaurian from the Lower Jurassic (Sinemurian) of Lyme Regis (plesiosauria.com)
Thaumatodracon (en.wikipedia.org)
Thaumatodracon – Plesiosaur Directory (plesiosauria.com)
Thaumatodracon 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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