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A sea monster with teeth so sharp they formed a “saw blade” swam in the waters of present-day Morocco about 66 million years ago, according to a new study.
Miners have discovered the remains of this creature – a lizard-like marine reptile called a mosasaur that lived in the age of dinosaurs – in the Sidi Chennane phosphate mine in Morocco’s Khouribga province. Once the researchers examined the specimen, they noticed its unique teeth, which had features never seen before in any other known reptile, living or extinct, the researchers said.
In honor of the predator’s deadly but weird pearly whites, the team named the mosasaur Xenodens calminechari, whose genus name means “strange tooth” in Greek and Latin, and whose species name translates to “like a saw” in Arabic.
Related: Image gallery: Ancient sea monsters
His clenched, knife-like teeth gave X. calminechari a sharp bite similar to a shark and may have been the key to its survival; X. calminechari was not tall – he was about the size of a porpoise – so he was probably relying on his agility and his weapon-shaped teeth to get by.
During the end Cretaceous period, when X. calminechari was alive, Morocco lay under a tropical sea. These warm waters were filled with predatory marine animals, including other species of mosasaurs, long-necked plesiosaurs, giant sea turtles, and saber-toothed fish.
“An immense diversity of mosasaurs lived here,” said Nick Longrich, senior researcher at the Milner Center for Evolution at the University of Bath in the UK, said in a press release. “Some were giant, deep-diving predators like modern sperm whales, others with huge teeth and up to 10 meters. [32 feet] long, were the best predators like killer whales, still others ate crustaceans like the modern ones sea otters – and then there was the strange little one Xenodens. “
X. calminechariThe unusual dentition of it likely gave it a unique hunting strategy, “likely involving a cutting motion used to slice up pieces of large prey, or to pick it up,” the researchers wrote in the study.
“A mosasaur with shark teeth is an original adaptation of mosasaurs so surprising that it looked like a fantastic creature out of the imagination of an artist”, study principal researcher Nour-Eddine Jalil, paleontologist at the National Museum of natural history of Paris and Cadi Ayyad University of Marrakech, Morocco, said in the statement.
The discovery of X. calminechari also adds evidence that the marine reptile ecosystem, as well as the diversity, in Morocco was thriving during the late Cretaceous. But it all ended when the 10-kilometer-wide rock crashed into Earth, causing the extinction of these sea creatures and dinosaurs.
A preliminary copy of the study was published online Jan. 16 in the journal Cretaceous research.
Originally posted on Live Science.
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