Sea Reptiles
Tethys Ocean
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Sea ReptilesSea Reptiles · 4 Oct 2026About 2.5 metres long, with legs like a land animal and buried in the deposits of an ancient lake: researchers have described a new freshwater mosasaur from Provence. Mosasaurs are known as marine reptiles of the Cretaceous. This animal, named *Garamaudo bauciensis*, probably lived in freshwater near Bouc-Bel-Air in south-eastern France about 85 million years ago.
Sea ReptilesSea Reptiles · 2 Oct 2026Ichthyosaurs made a lightning start in the Triassic. According to the median of a new evolutionary model, the range of their skull lengths peaked around 231.1 million years ago. At that point, only about one eighth of their evolutionary history had passed. That is the finding of a study that has not yet been peer-reviewed. Neither sea level nor sea-surface temperature, rock area or sedimentary sequences show a turning point that matches it significantly.
Sea ReptilesSea Reptiles · 29 Sept 2026A skeleton from Asturias tears down an old boundary: this ichthyosaur from Spain unquestionably belongs to *Ichthyosaurus anningae*, a species previously confirmed only in Dorset, England. Judged by its upper arm bone, it is also the largest known animal of its species. It swam through a Lower Jurassic sea whose fauna closely linked northern Spain with Britain.
Sea ReptilesSea Reptiles · 14 Sept 2026A rock block from Japan sat in a museum for more than three decades — packed with mosasaur bones that nobody had recognised. Researchers found four overlooked bones inside it, including the first confirmed front upper-jaw bone from a mosasaur in Japan. A braincase bone bears a combination of features unlike any described mosasaur. It may represent a new species, but that has not been established.
