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A jumbo " ocean dragon " spine plucked from a riverbank in Mississippi could belong to to the largest mosasaur ever find in the state , scientist say .
research worker only found a single vertebra from the creature and are n’t sure on the nose how large the mosasaur was in full , but it is reckon to have been at least 30 feet ( 9 meters ) long , Hattiesburg Americanreported .
The fossil is a vertebra fromMosasaurus hoffmanni, one of the largest mosasaurs to ever live.
Mosasaurs , or " sea Draco , " govern the oceans whendinosaursdominated the nation towards the last of theCretaceous period(145 million to 66 million year ago ) . The newly discovered fossil belonged toMosasaurushoffmanni , which was one of the big — if not the largest — mosasaur metal money .
James Starnes , a geologist at the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality , espy the fossil protruding from a stream bed just south of Starkville on April 15 , he told Live Science in an email . His fellow geologist , Jonathan Leard , then carefully pulled it out of the deposit .
" I instantly knew what it was , but was totally awe struck by its size , " Starnes said . " The feeling you get when you ascertain a fossil , even as a professional , never gets old . But when you find something you have never seen before , the lightness can be overwhelming . "
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Mosasaurs were a diverse chemical group of maritime reptilian . Researchers are still figure out the size of the largest mosasaur species , but they likely reached a maximal distance of around 50 feet ( 15 m ) . One of the with child specimens on record is a skull that belonged toM. hoffmanniand is estimated to be around 56 feet ( 17 meters ) long , according to a 2014 study published in the journalProceedings of the Zoological Institute RAS .
The fresh discovered vertebra dodo is more than 7 inch ( 18 cm ) wide at its widest point . Starnes and his colleagues compared the fogy to the largest mosasaur remains carry in the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science , which admit jaws , portions of a skull and a tooth . Starnes noted that the jaw and skull appear to be from a pocket-sized someone than the individual represented by the new vertebra , but the tooth looked like it belong to an somebody that was more comparable in size to the new specimen . In other word , the unexampled fogy seemed to belong to a mosasaur that was braggart or as big as the large in the state museum . Starnes noted it could be the with child in the state ’s history .
" It may represent the largest , " Starnes said . " The lumbar vertebra we found is a honest indicator to the relative sizing of the animal . This is the biggest one that I have ever encountered . "
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M. hoffmanniwas an solar apex predator , hunting down prey with large jaws and cone shape - mould tooth . declamatory mosasaurs likely eat whatever they need for the most part , let in Pisces , sharks , ocean shuttlecock and even other mosasaurs — research worker have found theremains of mosasaursin the fossilized stomachs of other mosasaurs . The jumbo mosasaur that left behind this particulare vertebra in all probability had no dearth of food in what is now Mississippi , which had a very different environment towards the end of the Cretaceous .
" Mississippi was wholly hatch at the clock time by warm shallow tropic ocean that was team up with spirit , include a blanket diversity of sharks , fish , marine lizards , and ammonites , " Starnes said . " Pterosaurs and even some fowl would have been fly overhead while a variety of both plant and nitty-gritty - eating dinosaur of unlike sizes and kind would have been walking the shoring lines and through the wooded wood along the coastal estuaries . "
As well as being one of the largest , M. hoffmanniwas also one of the last mosasaurs . The group went extinct alongside non - avian dinosaurs after theChicxulub asteroidslammed into Earth 66 million days ago . The rich marine ecosystems that mosasaurs depended oncollapsed follow the strike , add the reign of this dominant ocean predator to a lasting terminal .
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