Sea titan, the giant sea monster that terrorized the seas 66 million years ago

The fossil of a giantess marine lizard, which “ruled” the oceans 66 million years ago, at the time of the end of the dinosaurs, scientists in Morocco have discovered. This is a huge new mosasaur, Thalassotitan atrox. It had very large jaws and teeth, with which it hunted other marine reptiles.

The marine ones “monsters” it was a reality tens of millions of years ago. While the dinosaurs dominated on land, the mosasaurs, giant marine reptiles, had the “upper hand” in the sea.

Mosasaurs were not dinosaurs, but huge marine lizards that reached 12 meters in length and were distant relatives of today’s iguanas and some lizards. There were many species of mosasaurs, which ate either small fish, ammonites, or other marine reptiles.

The discovery of the new species, which had a massive 1.4m skull with large conical teeth like a modern orca, was made an hour’s drive from Casablanca, in an area that had been flooded by the Atlantic towards the end of the Cretaceous period. Thalassotitan lived in the last million years of the dinosaur era and was a contemporary of animals such as Tyrannosaurus (T.rex) and Triceratops.

Thalassotitan is estimated to have been at the top of the food chain as the most formidable predator, occupying a position comparable to today’s killer whales (orcas) and great white sharks, according to the Athens News Agency.

The scientists from four countries (Britain, France, Spain, Morocco), led by Dr Nick Longrich of the Milner Center for Evolution at the University of Bath in the UK, who did the relevant publication in the paleontological journal “Cretaceous Research”they estimate that Thalassotitan was a threat to everything swimming at the time, including other Thalassotitans and mosasaurs in general.

“The Thalassotitan was an impressively formidable animal. Imagine a Komodo dragon crossed with a great white shark crossed with a Tyrannosaurus crossed with a killer whale”Longrich reported.