A prehistoric marine creature with a neck longer than that of a giraffe and a crocodile-like skull has been discovered 70 million years after it roamed the oceans.
The bones of the 23-foot-long beast were unearthed in Wyoming’s Pierre Shale, where there was once a vast inland sea.
Now, for the first time, scientists have documented the predator whose name Serpentisuchops translates to “snake-faced crocodile.”
Professor of geology at the College of Charleston and primary author of the new study, Scott Persons, painted an eerie image when describing the creature’s look.
He said, “Imagine a lizard roughly the size of a cow.”
Replace its legs with flippers, lengthen its neck by 1.5 meters, and give it a long, narrow mouth — just like a crocodile.
It is a description that may conjure up images of plesiosaurs, the prehistoric sea creature commonly cited as the inspiration for the Loch Ness Monster.
However, even among these, Serpentisuchops pfisterae stands out.
“When I was a student, I was taught that all late-evolving plesiosaurs fall into one of two anatomical types,” stated Dr. Persons.
There are people with extremely long necks and small heads, and those with extremely short necks and long jaws.
Our new animal completely defies these classifications.
This new creature features a crocodile-like snout and a 32-vertebrae-long neck.
In comparison, your neck contains only seven vertebrae.
Its neck is longer than that of the gigantic giraffe, which measures seven feet.
And in the vast prehistoric sea that originally encompassed the majority of contemporary North America, may have conferred an evolutionary advantage.
Dr. Persons stated that the long, thin jaws and long, flexible neck were likely adaptations for rapidly striking sideways through the water.
It would have been ideal for capturing small, fast-swimming fish.
Scientists are being pushed to reexamine previously known plesiosaurs due to the creature’s peculiarity.
Dr. Persons stated, “Paleontologists have always concluded that if a plesiosaur has large jaws, it must also have a short neck.”
“Serpentisuchops demonstrates that this assumption is not necessarily accurate.
Multiple older plesiosaur species must now be reevaluated to ensure that the neck sizes of these creatures have not been underestimated.
The excellent preservation of the neck skeleton benefited the research.
This was conceivable because when the animal died, its remains sunk to the ocean floor, where it was buried for 70 million years by fine sediment.
It was only discovered in 1995 on territory owned by Anna Pfister, who is commemorated in the creature’s biological name, pfisterae.
Since then, a team of volunteers at the Glenrock Paleon Museum has been chipping away at the rock covering the bones.
Not until the present study, which was published in the journal iScience, was it documented scientifically.
