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The same team of researchers that discovered plesiosaurs that lived 160 million years ago in northern Chile, made another find worthy of applause in the Atacama Desert: the first pliosaur fossils found in our country.
It is a species known to be one of the biggest marine predators from the Jurassic period, having a more powerful bite than that of the Tyrannosaurus rex.
About 20 kilometers from Calama, they found fragments of the jaw and limbs, in an area that at that time was submerged in the sea.
Previously, there was another record of pliosaurs in the Southern Hemisphere: an isolated vertebra found in Argentina corresponding to the Calovian period (168 to 166 million years ago. This finding, on the other hand, is the first associated with the Oxfordian period, an epoch ranging from 163 million to 157 million years behind.
Rodrigo Otero, a paleontologist with the Fossil Record and Vertebrate Evolution Project at the University of Chile, led this research and explained that the discovery fills a temporal gap between the Calovian remains and two endemic species also found in Argentina from the Titonian period (152 to 156 million years ago).
“In the sector we are studying, we have found new materials from marine vertebrates, including cranial remains of ichthyosaurs, marine crocodiles and plesiosaurs, along with a diversity of fish ranging from very small forms to giant filter forms that are estimated to be about 10 meters in length “, indicates Otero, noting that this diversity in the area suggests the hypothesis of a marine corridor or “Corridor of the Caribbean” which connected the marine fauna of the Sea of Tethys (today’s North Atlantic) and that of the ancient Pacific Ocean during the Middle and Upper Jurassic, when part of the Chilean territory was submerged in the sea and South America still integrated Gondwana.
What were the pliosaurs like?
Pliosaurs were marine reptiles related to plesiosaurs that reigned in the Jurassic seas. They had a huge head, jaws and teethThey could also reach up to 15 meters or more, characteristics that made it a mega predator.
Rodrigo Otero explains that this animal “was characterized by having a large skull with an elongated face, with very robust teeth and firmly attached to the jaw. The neck was short and robust, its body was hydrodynamic and its extremities were adapted as a fins “.
“The pliosaur was a predator of large organisms, possibly plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs and sharks, among others. Making a parallel with current marine fauna, plesiosaurs were more similar to current seals, while the pliosaur was ecologically similar to today’s killer whales. It is highly probable that among the pliosaurs were the top predators of the Upper Jurassic food chain “, the paleontologist details.
Researchers from the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Chile and the Museum of Natural and Cultural History of the Atacama Desert presented the work in the journal South American Journal of Earth Sciences.
