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Happy first #MosasaurMonday of 2025! Thank you to everyone who followed along with my mosasaur advent calendar; ICYMI, here's a thread of every #MosAdvent post from 2024.
You may notice lots of Tylosaurus - there's a reason for that...rather, several reasons😉
Stay tuned in 2025!
Since it's December & I'm a fan of advent calendars, let's count down the end of the year with cool mosasaur fossils!
I'm a few days late, so we'll go ahead & do 4 at once with this Prognathodon that was found with not one not two but THREE other mosa skulls preserved inside it!
#MosAdvent #31: Tylosaurus "Bunker" is the largest mosasaur known (from *reliable* estimates), ~14m long with a skull as long as I am tall. Very excited to share new work involving this guy in 2025 - long live the Lizard King! 🌊🦎👑
#MosAdvent #30: a complete mosasaur skeleton, osseous and cartilaginous - Tylosaurus AMNH 221, arguably the best preserved tylosaur (& one of the best mosasaurs) known to science. This photo was taken in 2022, when we removed the glass to scan, photograph, & study it up close.
#MosAdvent #29: Grand Animal of Maastricht, the holotype of Mosasaurus hoffmannii, housed in Paris. It's nearly impossible to photograph, as it's in a glass box under a glass ceiling, so I'm serving it to you as a rotisserie using the photogrammetric model I made of it in 2023.
#MosAdvent #28: Mosasaurus on display in the Royal Belgian Inst. of Nat. Sci. I've been in the Palate Zone lately, as it's criminally under-figured in existing mosasaur literature, & R303 has the best intact palate of any mosasaur I know (that's visible from the outside, anyway)
#MosAdvent #27: Clidastes on display in the Kansas University Museum of Natural History. As with any good extinct animal the taxonomic history of this clade is a total dumpsterfire: the genus type is one (1) incomplete vertebra & an important species type was destroyed in WW2
#MosAdvent #26: Tylosaurus in the collections of the AMNH. While normal advent calendars are only 24 days long, but we're doing a full month for mosasaurs because even so, we'll only get through about 10% of the specimens I've documented (<1% of mosasaurs in N. American museums!)
#MosAdvent #25: 'Eustace,' the holotype of Jormungandr walhallaensis in the North Dakota State Museum. Jorgie represents a pivotal time in mosasaurine evolution: the transition from small, more "primitive" Clidastes-like forms to the leviathan Mosasaurus.
Happy holidays!
#MosAdvent #24: Tethysaurus for real this time in the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle - for real both literally (not a cast) & taxonomically (the holotype). Very odd little guy, & very important window into early mosasaur anatomy & diversity.
#MosAdvent #23: a cast of Tethysaurus on display in the Perot Museum, mounted above a modern Varanus skeleton - regardless of your preferred mosasaur origin hypothesis, the ancestor to mosasauroids likely looked a whole lot like modern monitor lizards.
#MosAdvent #22: Platecarpus skull on display in the University of Michigan Museum if Natural History. Not sure what it is about Platecarpus that causes them to - seemingly more often than not - preserve in pancake form.
#MosAdvent #21: Aigialosaurus in the Bayerische Staatssammlung für Paläontologie & Geologie in Munich - a little leggy guy with big flippery descendants.
#MosAdvent #19: Tylosaurus proriger VP-3 & I in the Sternberg Museum, & photos of Charles Sternberg² with the same specimen in the Fick Fossil & History Museum. Unbelievably gorgeous fossil & one of my personal favorites!
#MosAdvent #18: Plioplatecarpine in the Natuurhistorisch Museum Maastricht. I'm posting a braincase today because I did a Big Stupid, much like mosasaurs likely did all the time, & realized after a 2hr drive at the airport check-in desk that I forgot my wallet (ID & everything)
#MosasaurMonday & #MosAdvent #16: Tylosaurus proriger FMNH UR902, in the collections of the Field Museum. This little box may not look like much, but this guy's very special to me as the first fossil that I ever studied, way back in the Before Times (April 2019).
#MosAdvent #15: Prognathodon solvayi holotype in the Royal Belgian Institute of Nat. Sci. Note the prognathous don (forward-pointing teeth) for which the genus is named, & that our N. American friend from yesterday, "P." overtoni, lacks - hence the question of its genus referral.
#MosAdvent #14: Prognathodon in the collections of the Royal Tyrrell Museum. Whether or not this species, P. overtoni, ought to be classified in the genus 'Prognathodon' is debatable, but either way, this was probably not a pleasant animal to be around.
#MosAdvent #13: cast of a monster Plioplatecarpus on display at the North Dakota State Museum. Not that any mosasaurs are really small, but this one stands out as particularly large for a plioplatecarpine. The real bones are on display below, next to a piece of Huge Squid.
#MosAdvent #12: holotype of M̵a̵c̵r̵o̵s̵a̵u̵r̵u̵s̵ R̵h̵i̵n̵o̵s̵a̵u̵r̵u̵s̵ R̵h̵a̵m̵p̵h̵o̵s̵a̵u̵r̵u̵s̵ Tylosaurus proriger, currently housed in the Harvard MCZ.
Today, I write about this fossil from Cope's own desk - out of spite, of course
#MosAdvent #11: cast of Mosasaurus hoffmanni in the NJ State Museum, & me with the front 2/3 of the (mostly) real jaw. If you can believe it, this guy isn't particularly large for Mosasaurus.
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