Dino card No. 1836 of 2,015

Tylosaurus

Say it: ty-LOH-sore-us

Name means: “knob lizard”1

Ate: MeatMosasaursLate CretaceousNot technically a dinosaur

Tylosaurus was a giant marine lizard that swam in the oceans during the Late Cretaceous. It was not a dinosaur, but a mosasaur, a fierce predator with a long snout and paddle-like flippers. It could grow over 13 meters long, as big as a school bus!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

94 to 66 million years ago2

Late Cretaceous

Fossils found in

North America (USA, Canada), Europe (Belgium, France, Germany, Sweden), Africa (Angola), and the Middle East (Jordan)1 2

Food

Meat1 2

Length

up to 13 m1

largest species T. rex measured over 13 meters

Artist's life restoration of Tylosaurus — How Tylosaurus may have looked, by Nobu Tamura email:[email protected] http://spinops.blogspot.com/. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Scientists still argue about colours and details.

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

How big was it?

cool stuff

Fun facts

Tylosaurus had a long, bony snout that stuck out like a prow, which is why one species is named proriger, meaning 'prow-bearing'.1

Fossils show Tylosaurus fought each other, with bite marks on skulls and other bones.1

One Tylosaurus skeleton had the remains of a 2-meter-long mosasaur, a diving bird, a fish, and a shark all in its stomach at once.1

Tylosaurus had an endothermic (warm-blooded) metabolism, unlike most modern lizards and snakes.1

It gave birth to live young, not eggs, based on its close relatives.2

Tylosaurus lived from about 93.9 to 66 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous.2

Myth buster

Myth: Tylosaurus was a dinosaur.

Truth: Tylosaurus was a mosasaur, a marine reptile more closely related to modern monitor lizards and snakes than to dinosaurs.1

For dino experts

Scientific name: Tylosaurus
Named by: Marsh 18722
Group: Mosasaurs
Family / clade: Mosasauridae2
Classification: Mosasauroidea2
Age of the rocks: 94 to 66 million years (Turonian to Maastrichtian)2
Rock formations: Niobrara, Pierre Shale, Tar Heel2
Countries: USA, Sweden, Canada, Angola, Belgium, Germany2
Fossil records: 67 in the Paleobiology Database2
Discovery: The first species, T. proriger, was described in 1869 by Edward Drinker Cope, and the genus Tylosaurus was named in 1872 by Othniel Charles Marsh. The type specimen was found in Kansas, USA, in the late 1860s.1
Still debated: Scientists still debate how many species of Tylosaurus existed and how they are related to each other.1

Where the facts come from

Tylosaurus (en.wikipedia.org)
Tylosaurus 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.