Ectenosaurus
Name:
Ectenosaurus.
Phonetic: Ek-ten-o-sore-us.
Named By: D. A. Russel - 1967.
Synonyms: Clidastes velox, Platecarpus
oxyrhinus.
Classification: Chordata, Reptilia, Squamata,
Mosasauridae, Plioplatecarpinae.
Species: E. clidastoides
(type).
Diet: Carnivore/Piscivore.
Size: Skull roughly 74 centimetres long.
Known locations: USA, Kansas.
Time period: Campanian of the Cretaceous.
Fossil representation: Skull and forward half of the
post cranial skeleton.
A
not very well known genus of mosasaur,
Ectenosaurus has still helped
us to confirm that older ideas about how mosasaurs swam are simply
wrong. Over a hundred years ago mosasaurs were thought to have been
close relatives of snakes (again an idea that is now seen as
wrong), and like them the mosasaurs were thought to undulate their
entire bodies to swim through the water. However the slab that the
Ectenosaurus holotype is preserved on also has the
impressions of
scales on it. These scales are a few millimetres long, oval and
slightly ridged. They also made it so that the trunk of Ectenosaurus
would have been fairly rigid, and not suited to the smooth undulating
motion that snakes are capable of. This means that swimming
propulsion for Ectenosaurus must have been
provided by the tail,
and as genera such as Platecarpus
and Proganthodon
show is,
Ectenosaurus most probably had a tail fluke also.
Ectenosaurus
was first named as a species of Clidastes
in 1953, all the way
until 1967 when it was renamed as a new genus by Dale Russel.
Further reading
- Systematics and Morphology of American Mosasaurs (Reptilia,
Sauria). - Bulletin of the Peabody Museum of Natural History
23:1-252. - D. A. Russel - 1967.
- Three-Dimensionally Preserved Integument Reveals Hydrodynamic
Adaptations in the Extinct Marine Lizard Ectenosaurus
(Reptilia,
Mosasauridae). - PLOS ONE. 6 (11): e27343. - Johan Lindgren, Michael J.
Everhart & Michael W. Caldwell - 2011.
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