The mouth full of pointed, sharp teeth, powerful fins and a length of up to twelve meters: Thalasso titanium atrox was a formidable predator and certainly stood at the head of the Cretaceous Sea off the coast of northwest Africa over 65 million years ago. A fossil of the gigantic mosasaur was unearthed by Nick Longrich from the University of Bath and his team in the rich fossil deposits near Casablanca in Morocco and described in »Cretaceous Research«. Remains of potential prey including sea turtles, plesiosaurs, and other mosasaurs were also found alongside the animal.
Longrich and Co write that the new species is believed to be a hybrid of Komodo dragon, great white shark, T. rex and killer whale had to introduce. Mosasaurs are distantly related to modern-day lizards and snakes. But they were even better adapted to aquatic life than the marine iguanas, which live on the Galapagos Islands and regularly come ashore to breed or even just warm up. Thalasso titanium atrox and his relatives no longer had legs, but fins and a tail similar to sharks.
Remains unearthed include skulls, vertebrae, phalanxes of fingers and toes. Together they allowed a complete description of the head with jaws and teeth, and the skeleton including shoulders and forelimbs. Thalasso Titanium therefore had an enormous skull of 1.4 meters long, followed by a body almost 9 meters long: it surpassed killer whales. And while most mosasaurs had long jaws and slender teeth for catching fish, pointed Thalasso Titanium a short, broad snout and massive, conical teeth also like killer whales. With it, he could grab and tear up huge prey. These adaptations lead the researcher to conclude that it was an apex predator. It occupied the same ecological niche as today’s killer whales or great white sharks.
© Artistic rendering: Andrey Atuchin (detail)
Artist’s rendering of the marine iguana | Mosasaurs were agile hunters, preying on fish as well as pterosaurs flying low over the water. Their size made them top predators in the Cretaceous seas.