Cimoliasaurus
(Sometimes spelled as Cimoliosaurus)
Name:
Cimoliasaurus.
Phonetic: Sim-o-le-ah-sore-us.
Named By: Joseph Jiedy - 1851.
Synonyms: Cimoliasaurus brevior,
Cimoliasaurus maccoyi, Discosaurus, Oligosimus, Piptomerus.
Classification: Chordata, Reptilia,
Sauropterygia, Pleisoauria.
Species: C. magnus, C. valdensis,
C. snowii.
Diet: Probably piscivorous.
Size: Uncertain sue to the assemblage of remains and
partial incomplete preservation of many specimens.
Known locations: Europe, North America and
Australasia. *Possibly not an accurate representation of the genus.
Time period: Cretaceous (sometimes credited as mid
Jurassic to end of the Cretaceous). *Possibly not an accurate
representation of the genus.
Fossil representation: Multiple partial and
incomplete remains. Possibly not all indicative of the genus.
The
term most often attributed to Cimoliasaurus is
‘wastebasket taxon’
due to the practice of some palaeontologists assigning otherwise
unidentifiable plesiosaur bones to the genus. This is why
geographical distribution for the genus covers Europe, North
America, and Australia and New Zealand, while the temporal range in
the past has run from the mid Jurassic to the very end of the
Cretaceous period (though sometimes the range is cited as Early
Cretaceous to the end of the Maastrichtian).
Because
of this the validity of Cimoliasaurus as a genus
remains dubious, but
more may come from the remains attributed to Cimoliasaurus
such as the
discovery of new plesiosaur genera. This has happened already with
the creation of the species Cimoliasaurus laramiensis
by Knight in
1900, which was renamed as a species of Tricleidus
(T.
laramiensis) by Mehl in 1912 before eventually being
raised as a
new genus called Tatenectes
by O'Keefe and Wahl in 2003.
With
more in depth study it is probable that one day Cimoliasaurus
may one
day be cleaned up enough to get an accurate description of a specific
genus. Such cases of a wastebasket taxon being cleaned up is
nothing new, with one of the best known examples being that for the
dinosaur Megalosaurus.
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