Monsters of Aramberri
The monster of Aramberri is the name given to the fragmentarily preserved fossil of a reptile that was found in 1984 by a student in the La Casita Formation ( Kimmeridgium ) near Aramberri in Nuevo León (Mexico). It was first described by Hähnel in 1988 as a dinosaur , but then recognized as a very large pliosaur . It was the first pliosaur found in Mexico. The animal has not yet been precisely identified below the family level; in the press the fossil was called Liopleurodon or Simolestesdescribed. Today it is located under the inventory number UANL-FCT-R2 in the collection of the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León in San Nicolás de los Garza , a city in the greater Monterrey area .
description
The size of parts of the shoulder blade and the diameter of the vertebrae of more than 20 cm suggest a length of the animal of 15 m or more and a weight of 50 tons. At first it appeared as if the animal was not fully grown at the time of its death, as there were open bone sutures on the cervical vertebrae. However, recent research suggests that it may be an already fully grown or almost fully grown specimen, and that the characteristics typical of young animals in large pliosaurs may also persist in adult animals.
It was thought to be 20 m or more in length when fully grown. This made it one of the largest Jurassic marine reptiles. Only Shastasaurus sikanniensis , an ichthyosaur that was discovered on the banks of the Sikanni Chief River in British Columbia in 1991 , reached a similar size (21 m) .
The skull of the "monster of Aramberri" has a large bite mark on the wing bone , which probably comes from a 40 cm long tooth (three times as long as the tooth of a Tyrannosaurus ) of a larger conspecific. The wing bone was only pushed apart and shows healing tissue at its edges. A second wound in the skull bone from a later attack, on the other hand, shows a splintered, never healed wound edge and was probably the cause of death.
meaning
The "Monster of Aramberri" fills a geographical gap between the pliosaurs of South America and those of the western Tethys and supports the thesis of a sea connection between the North Atlantic and western North America (Pacific).
literature
- Richard Ellis: Sea Dragons: Predators of the Prehistoric Oceans . Pp. 181-182, University Press of Kansas, 2003, ISBN 0-7006-1269-6
- Marie-Céline Buchy, Eberhard Frey, Wolfgang Stinnesbeck & José Guadalupe López-Oliva: First occurrence of a gigantic pliosaurid plesiosaur in the late Jurassic (Kimmeridgian) of Mexico. Bulletin de la Societe Geologique de France; May 2003; v. 174; no. 3; p. 271-278; doi : 10.2113 / 174.3.271
- Press release from the University of Karlsruhe (PDF file; 812 kB)
Individual evidence
- ^ Digital library of the University of Karlsruhe
- ↑ Richard Ellis 2003, p. 89