Mosasaurus
c. 82-66 million years ago · Event
Not a dinosaur but the sea's answer to one: a seventeen-metre marine lizard — kin to today's monitors — that ruled the late Cretaceous oceans, eating sharks, turtles and smaller mosasaurs. A skull dug from a Dutch chalk mine in the 1770s, seized by the French Revolutionary army as war booty, was among the first fossils to force the idea of extinction itself.
On these timelines: The Age of Dinosaurs, Master
More from The Age of Dinosaurs
- Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction (66000000 BCE)
- Tyrannosaurus rex (68000000 BCE)
- Mesozoic Era (252000000 BCE)
- Paleozoic Era (541000000 BCE)
- Jurassic Period (201000000 BCE)
- Cretaceous Period (145000000 BCE)
- Triassic Period (252000000 BCE)
- Archaeopteryx and the first birds (150000000 BCE)
Around 82000000 BCE
- Velociraptor (75000000 BCE)
- Pteranodon (86000000 BCE)