![]() From the back of the head to the tip of the tail, the great mosasaur was decorated by a long ribbon of fringe. If only Knight had painted that scene, as well! Yet there was something other than the imposing nature of Knight’s Tylosaurus that struck me. Then raising its head and fore paddles into the air, it bids defiance to the whole brute creation, of which it is monarch. ![]() The great creature strikes its opponent with the impact of a racing yacht and piercing heart and lungs with its powerful ram, leaves a bleeding wreck upon the water. The flexible body and long eel-like tail set up their serpentine motion, and the vast mass of animal life, over thirty feet in length, rushes forward with ever-increasing speed through water that foams away on either side and gurgles in a long wake behind. It sets its four powerful paddles in motion, and unrolling its forked tongue from beneath its windpipe, throws it forward with a threatening hiss, the only note of defiance it can raise. Sternberg envisioned one such creature lolling about in the warm water, only to be rudely interrupted by one of its own kind:īut see! an enemy in the distance is attracting our reptile’s attention. Sternberg – a skilled 19th century fossil hunter who uncovered quite a number of marine reptiles from the marine strata of Kansas – daydreamed about the power of mosasaurs in his autobiography Life of a Fossil Hunter. I certainly wasn’t the first to imagine such scenes from a time when a shallow sea encroached over what is now the middle of North America. The violence was all in my imagination, but the sly smile of the enormous mosasaur led me to believe that the poor Protostega had little chance of escape. ![]() A flock of Pteranodon hang in the background – no doubt waiting to pluck bloody turtle bits out of the sea once the inevitable carnage had ended. Suspended within the swell of a Late Cretaceous sea, a grinning Tylosaurus looms over a fleeing marine turtle known to paleontologists as Protostega. Knight created for Chicago’s Field Museum. That impression came almost entirely from a painting renowned paleo-artist Charles R. This enormous, sea-going lizard was a true sea monster and the undoubted ruler of the ancient oceans. ![]() Truth is, the great Tylosaurus had no fringeĪs far as my younger, fossil-philic self was concerned, there was never a more terrible marine predator than Tylosaurus. ‘Tho the death of a childhood memory makes folks twinge ![]()
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