A sea monster with such sharp teeth that they formed a “saw-like blade” swam about 66 million years ago in the waters of what is now Morocco, a new study finds.
Miners have discovered the remains of this creature – a lizard-like marine reptile called a mosasaur that lived during the dinosaur era – at the Sidi Chennane phosphate mine in the Moroccan province of Khouribga. After investigating the sample, they noticed the unique teeth that had features never seen before in any other known reptile, living or extinct.
In honor of the predator’s deadly yet strange pearl whites, the team named the mosasaur Xenodens calminechari, whose gender name means “foreign tooth” in Greek and Latin, and whose species name translates into Arabic “like a saw”.
Related: Image Gallery: Ancient Monsters of the Sea
His now packed knife-like teeth give X. calminechari a shark-like cut bite and could be the key to his survival; X. calminechari was not large – it was about as big as a brown pig – so it probably relied on its agility and weapon-like teeth to get by.
During the late Chalk period, when X. calminechari lived, Morocco lay under a tropical sea. That warm water was filled with predators, including other mosasaur species, long-necked plesiosaurs, giant sea turtles, and saber-toothed fish.
“A large variety of mosasaurs lived here,” studied lead researcher Nick Longrich, a senior lecturer at the Milner Center for Evolution at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom. said in a statement. ‘Some were giant, deep-diving predators such as modern pot fish, others with large teeth and up to ten meters in size [32 feet] long, were top predators like orka’s, still others ate shellfish like modern sea otters – and then there was the strange little Xenodens. “
X. calminechariThe unusual bite probably gave a unique hunting strategy, ‘probably a cutting motion used to cut or remove pieces of large prey,’ the researchers write in the study.
“A shark’s mosasaur is a new adaptation of mosasaurs that is so surprising that it looked like a fantastic creature from an artist’s imagination,” studied senior researcher Nour-Eddine Jalil, a paleontologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and Cadi Ayyad. University of Marrakesh, Morocco, said in the statement.
The discovery of X. calminechari also adds evidence that the marine reptile ecosystem, as well as diversity, thrived in Morocco at the end of the Cretaceous. But it all ended when the 6-kilometer-wide rock (10 kilometers) rocked into the earth, causing the extinction of these marine creatures and the dinosaurs.
A preview of the study was published online in the journal on January 16. Chalk research.
Originally published on Live Science.