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Westphaliasaurus

Say it: west-FAL-ee-uh-SORE-us

Name means: “Westphalia lizard”1

Ate: MeatPlesiosaursEarly JurassicNot technically a dinosaur

Westphaliasaurus was a long-necked marine reptile that swam in the warm, shallow seas of what is now Germany. It was not a dinosaur, but a plesiosaur, a type of sea creature that used four flippers to paddle through the water. Scientists think it was about 4.5 metres long, as long as a small car!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

193 to 184 million years ago3

Early Jurassic

Fossils found in

Lücking clay pit, Sommersell, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany3 1

Food

Meat3

Length

4.5 m1

estimate

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

How big was it?

How long was it?

as long as 4 dogs nose to tailas long as 25 bananas end to end

How big was Westphaliasaurus compared to YOU?

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cool stuff

Fun facts

Westphaliasaurus is known from a nearly complete skeleton, but the skull and about 38% of the upper neck vertebrae are missing.1

It lived during the Early Jurassic Period, about 192 to 184 million years ago.3

The fossil was discovered in 2007 by an amateur paleontologist named Sönke Simonsen.1

Its scientific name, Westphaliasaurus simonsensii, honors the discoverer Sönke Simonsen.1

Westphaliasaurus is one of only three plesiosaurs known from the Pliensbachian stage of the Early Jurassic.2

AI-made picture of Westphaliasaurus — An AI-made picture of how Westphaliasaurus 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: Westphaliasaurus
Named by: Schwermann and Sander 20113
Group: Plesiosaurs
Family / clade: Plesiosauroidea3
Classification: Plesiosauria > Sauropterygia3
Age of the rocks: 193 to 184 million years (Pliensbachian)3
Countries: Germany3
Fossil records: 1 in the Paleobiology Database3
Discovery: Westphaliasaurus was found by amateur paleontologist Sönke Simonsen in 2007 at a clay pit in Sommersell, Germany. It was named and described by scientists Leonie Schwermann and Martin Sander in 2011.1
Still debated: Scientists are not sure exactly how Westphaliasaurus is related to other plesiosaurs, because its skull is missing.1

Where the facts come from

Westphaliasaurus (en.wikipedia.org)
Early-diverging plesiosaurs from the Pliensbachian (Lower Jurassic) of northwestern Germany (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
Westphaliasaurus 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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