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ichthyosaur
Aug. 20th, 2018 08:41 amTheme week, one requested by a coworker: non-dino -saurs. Or maybe that would be more clear as non-dino *saurs, but then the pun is less clear. The Mesozoic era had a lot of Really Big reptiles with -suar at the end of their names that were not technically dinosaurs. This week, I'll cover five of them, starting with:
ichthyosaur (IK-thee-uh-sawr) - n., any of various extinct marine reptiles (order Ichthyosauria) having a flexible porpoise-like body, four paddlelike flippers, and an elongated toothed snout.
Ichthyosaurs evolved in the early Triassic period about 250 million years ago from a group of unidentified land reptiles that returned to the sea, and were the apex marine predator from the mid-Triassic through the early Jurassic before being displaced by plesiosaurs (of which more tomorrow), with a few species surviving until the mid Cretaceous. The type species, and first recognized one, is Ichthyosaurus communis:
Thanks, WikiMedia!
The name was coined in 1817 by Karl Dietrich Eberhard König from Greek ichthys, fish + saûros, lizard -- when they named it, lizard as ancestor was as good a guess as any.
---L.
ichthyosaur (IK-thee-uh-sawr) - n., any of various extinct marine reptiles (order Ichthyosauria) having a flexible porpoise-like body, four paddlelike flippers, and an elongated toothed snout.
Ichthyosaurs evolved in the early Triassic period about 250 million years ago from a group of unidentified land reptiles that returned to the sea, and were the apex marine predator from the mid-Triassic through the early Jurassic before being displaced by plesiosaurs (of which more tomorrow), with a few species surviving until the mid Cretaceous. The type species, and first recognized one, is Ichthyosaurus communis:
Thanks, WikiMedia!
The name was coined in 1817 by Karl Dietrich Eberhard König from Greek ichthys, fish + saûros, lizard -- when they named it, lizard as ancestor was as good a guess as any.
---L.
