Shonisaurus: Marine Giant!
Found in 1920 in Nevada’s Shoshone Formation, this absolutely gigantic #Triassic (around 235 mya) marine reptile is not a #dinosaur, despite the saurus name, but is rather a huge #ichthyosaur!
(Apologies for low audio)
At nearly 50’, it is astounding to behold. This one is on display at the Nevada State Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada. The holotype is in their collections, quite amazing to behold!
Here is a beast #sauorpod researchers can get behind, longer, and probably heavier, than a full-sized yellow school bus, it reminds the world gigantism in the seas happened first, and arguably best.
Ok, being in water is a bit like cheating thanks to being kinder than gravity in the weight department. Length though, they still concede to the #diplodocid #sauropods. Go landlubbers!
With 37 skeletons excavated at a Nevada desert locality in the 1950s and 60s, tis easy to understand how the hypotheses these were social creatures that beached themselves appeared. After all, sadly we see mass beaching from whales today.
There is another, more likely, explanation, though, that being this area was a body collecting “magnet,” the current in that area just right for carcass collecting. Something akin to the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry Allosaurus scenario. And yes, some use groupings of tyrannosaurs and Mapusaurus as evidence of socialization, but geologists are hard to sway in these discussions, pointing out the ways humans interpret geological processes as evidence of behavior. Apologies for the digression!
The exceptionally long, toothy snout, though a sculpt here, is known from lots of pieces and was indeed quite elongate. Did this thing live off of schools of fish or pursue larger fare?
It has a deep top-to-bottom body with tiny flippers and tail compared to what I thought they’d be proportionality. They had to remove a few feet of this tail so it would fit in this new building 😂.
#Ichthyosaurs breathed air and came to the surface regularly just like #whales. Imagine a whale-sized entity swimming about the Nevada desert as #dinosaurs were establishing their foothold on land. So cool!
#FossilCrates