Mosasaur Cannibalism?
Fossilized 'Sea Monster' Found In Angola With Three Others In Its Belly
SMU researchers have discovered an ancient "sea monster" that ate its own.
By Stephanie Pappas
DENVER — The mosasaur, a fearsome marine reptile that stalked the Cretaceous seas, scavenged its own kin, a new fossil find reveals.
"These are three different species of mosasaur inside the belly of a fourth species of mosasaur," said study researcher Louis Jacobs, a vertebrate paleontologist at Southern Methodist University in Texas.
The find isn't the first example of mosasaurs digesting mosasaurs, but it illuminates an ancient ecosystem surprisingly similar to ones seen in parts of the ocean today.
Mosasaurs were at the top of the marine food chain from about 98 million years ago to the end of the Cretaceous 66 million years ago, when they went extinct. As is the case for modern whales, the first mosasaur ancestors were land-dwellers. They looked not unlike today's monitor lizards, said study researcher Michael Polcyn, also a vertebrate paleontologist at Southern Methodist University.
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