They were pursuit predators or ambush predators of various sized prey and opportunistic feeders; their teeth could be used to pierce soft-bodied prey, especially fish. Their heads and teeth were very large, suited to grab and rip apart large animals.

What was the largest plesiosaur?

Plesiosaurs. The longest known plesiosauroid was Elasmosaurus at 14 metres (46 feet) long.

How many teeth did a plesiosaur have?

There are 20 to 25 teeth per upper jaw tooth row, and 24 per low jaw tooth row. Up to four teeth of a lower jaw's tooth row are found in the symphyseal region.

Is plesiosaur extinct?

During the Late Cretaceous, the elasmosaurids still had many species. All plesiosaurs became extinct as a result of the K-T event at the end of the Cretaceous period, approximately 66 million years ago.

Are plesiosaurs related to turtles?

These plesiosaurs evolved into different groups. They branched into sea turtles, crocodiles and other sea reptiles but also gave modern day whales their body shape.

What If You Were Trapped in a Meat-Eating Plant?

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Which marine reptiles are poisonous?

Sea snakes, or coral reef snakes, are a subfamily of elapid snakes, the Hydrophiinae, that inhabit marine environments for most or all of their lives. Most are venomous, except the genus Emydocephalus, which feeds almost exclusively on fish eggs.

Are marine reptiles extinct?

After the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period, marine reptiles were less numerous, but there was still a high variety of species in the early Cenozoic, such as "true" sea turtles, bothremydids, palaeophiid snakes, a few choristoderes such as Simoedosaurus and dyrosaurid crocodylomorphs.

What was the biggest thing to have ever lived?

A member of the infraorder Cetacea, the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus), is thought to be the largest animal ever to have lived. The maximum recorded weight was 190 tonnes for a specimen measuring 27.6 metres (91 ft), whereas longer ones, up to 33.6 metres (110 ft), have been recorded but not weighed.

Where was the first plesiosaur fossil found?

An army surgeon named Dr. Theophilus Turner discovered the fossils of a large animal in the Pierre Shale of Kansas, USA. The remains represented the first nearly complete plesiosaur specimen from North America.

What is the smallest animal?

This is where they found the smallest known type of frog called Paedophryne amauensis. The body length of an average adult is reported at less than 8 mm, about the size of a pea. When it was discovered in 2009, it was immediately awarded the title of “world's smallest vertebrate.”

Is a human an apex predator?

Apex predators affect prey species' population dynamics and populations of other predators, both in aquatic and in terrestrial ecosystems. ... Humans are not considered apex predators because their diets are typically diverse, although human trophic levels increase with consumption of meat.

What is the largest an animal can be?

The Antarctic blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus ssp. Intermedia) is the biggest animal on the planet, weighing up to 400,000 pounds (approximately 33 elephants) and reaching up to 98 feet in length.

What was the biggest mammal ever?

Blue whales are the largest animals ever to have lived. They are bigger than even the largest of the dinosaurs. They can grow to be as large as a jumbo jet! The biggest mammal that ever roamed the land was Paraceratherium.

What is the largest land mammal in the world?

The heaviest land mammal is the African bush elephant which has a weight of up to 5.4 tonnes (6 short tons). This enormous mammal measures 10-13 ft at the shoulder and consumes around 230 kilograms (500 lb) of vegetation a day. The elephant possesses a set of tusks that grow continuously throughout its life.

Is Carbonemys real?

Carbonemys cofrinii is an extinct podocnemidid turtle known from the Middle Paleocene Cerrejón Formation of the Cesar-Ranchería Basin in northeastern Colombia. The formation is dated at around 60 to 57 million years ago, starting at about five million years after the KT extinction event.

Did giant snakes exist?

The giant snake lived during the Middle to Late Paleocene epoch, a 10-million-year period immediately following the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event. The only known species is Titanoboa cerrejonensis, the largest snake ever discovered, which supplanted the previous record holder, Gigantophis garstini.