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Scientists have named an ancient specie of giant ocean lounge lizard with " angry eyebrows " and a stumpy tail after Jörmungandr , a sea serpent from Norse mythology .
The fearsome wight , Jǫrmungandrwalhallaensis , be 80 million yr ago in an ancient ocean in what is now North Dakota .
An artist’s rendition of the newly described mosasaur, namedJǫrmungandr walhallaensisafter a mythical Norse sea serpent.
" If you put flipper on a Komodo dragon and made it really big , that ’s what it would have looked like , " lead authorAmelia Zietlow , a postdoctoral student in relative biology at the American Museum of Natural History ’s Richard Gilder Graduate School , said in a statement .
Related:94 million - yr - one-time fossilized sea fiend is the oldest of its sort in North America
Zietlow and fellow worker distinguish the almost - complete skull , jaw , cervical spine and several vertebrae of the 24 - infantry - long ( 7 metre ) mosasaur in 2015 in Walhalla , North Dakota . The squad described the sea monster in a report published Monday ( Oct. 30 ) in the journalBulletin of the American Museum of Natural History .
Their analytic thinking showed thatJ.walhallaensiscontained many of the same features as two knownmosasaurs : the smallerClidastesand the much largerMosasaurus , which it predate . Like its giant cousin , J. walhallaensislived during theCretaceous period(roughly 145 million to 66 million years ago ) alongside dinosaur and had monolithic flippers and a " shark - same tail " that serve it glide through the water . It also had a bony rooftree on its skull that resemble " angry eyebrows , " agree to the argument .
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paleontologist still do n’t agree on whether mosasaurs are more closely related tolizardsor to snakes . However , this newly described species pop the question researchers more insight into these elusive sea creatures .
" As these animals evolve into these giant sea monsters , they were constantly making change , " Zietlow articulate . " This work gets us one stone’s throw closer to understanding how all these dissimilar forms are link to one another . "
