Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
teria. The Komodo dragon is thus a most impressive creature. However,
the modern lizards are dwarfed by their ancestors from the Age of Di-
nosaurs, which were 30 to 40 feet in length and were, during the heyday of
the dinosaurs, the most successful and largest of all seagoing vertebrates.
Although relatively few people have seen a Komodo dragon (and no
one has ever seen a living mosasaur, because the last of them died out at the
end of the Cretaceous Period, killed off no doubt by the lingering effects of
the comet that ended the Mesozoic Era), their family is fairly well known to
us. All, the living and the dead alike, are monitor lizards, a group still
highly successful in many parts of the world. Long ago, during the Cretaceous
Period, giant monitor lizards—the mosasaurs—were the largest and most fe-
rocious carnivores in the sea.
Mosasaurs were not the only large reptiles in the sea, of course. Two
other oceangoing reptiles also vie for our attention in the Mesozoic rock
record: the long-necked (and sometimes short-necked as well) creatures
known as plesiosaurs (the archetype for the Loch Ness monster) and the
more fish-like (or dolphin-like) forms called ichthyosaurs. The latter were
extremely abundant in the Jurassic, but by the Cretaceous Period they were
eclipsed in number (and certainly in size) by the mosasaurs and plesiosaurs
(elasmosaurs, such as the type found on the Puntledge River, are a type of
plesiosaur). Ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs were not dinosaurs either—it ap-
pears that no true dinosaurs made the evolutionary leap back into the sea.
Mosasaurs were very late arrivals to the Mesozoic world. Unlike ple-
siosaurs and ichthyosaurs, which can be traced well back into the earliest
epochs of the Mesozoic Era, mosasaurs first appeared in the Late Cretaceous.
Until the discoveries on Vancouver and Hornby Islands, they were largely
absent from the west coast of North America, having been found only at a
few localities in California.
All mosasaurs had four flippers, with the toes expanded into web-feet.
The bodies were long, the tail even longer. Some had tails with a large cau-
dal fin as well, a structure unknown in our world's lizards. As in modern-day
whales, the bones of the pelvic region were reduced, making locomotion on
land almost impossible. Yet unlike whales, which have lost any semblance of
Search WWH ::




Custom Search