Scientists claim giant sea lizards with ‘angry eyebrows’ roamed North Dakota 80 million years ago

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by David Propper

More than 80 million years ago, a giant sea lizard with “angry eyebrows” roamed the skies above North Dakota, according to a recent scientific discovery.

This new species was named Jormungand wallhallaensis. The name comes from both the sea serpent in Norse mythology and the small Dakota town of Walhalla, near where the reptile’s fossils were discovered several years ago.

The newly discovered reptile is part of the mosasaurid family, giant sea lizards that lived when dinosaurs roamed the earth, according to a study published last month in the Proceedings of the American Museum of Natural History. .

“If you put flippers on a Komodo dragon and made it really big, that’s basically what it would look like,” said study lead author Amelia Zietlow, a comparative biology doctoral student. To tell.

The study focused on fossils unearthed during a 2015 excavation in northeastern North Dakota, where a nearly complete skull, jaw and cervical vertebrae were all recovered, according to the American Museum of Natural History. .

The specimen is estimated to be about 24 feet long, and has flippers that are “angry eyebrows” caused by bony ridges on its skull and a stubby, shark-like tail.

It is estimated that they lived about 80 million years ago.

The new species contains characteristics of two famous mosasaurs, the study says. a smaller, more primitive mosasaur called Clidastes, and an even larger mosasaur that grew to about 50 feet long and lived at the same time as Tyrannosaurus.

“As these animals evolved into giant sea monsters, they were constantly changing,” said Zietlow, director of the American Museum of Natural History’s Richard Gilder Graduate School.

“This study brings us one step closer to understanding how all these different forms relate to each other.”

The first mosasaurs were discovered more than 200 years before this latest study.

“This fossil is from the geological period of the United States, but we don’t really understand it,” said co-author Clint Boyd.

“The more we can fill in the geographic and temporal timeline, the better we can understand these organisms,” added Boyd of the North Dakota Geological Survey.