An international team of paleontologists from China, the United States and Europe discovered the fossilized remains of a dinocephalosaur, a very long-necked marine lizard that lived about 250 million years ago. The prehistoric beast resembled an eastern dragon with its snake-like appearance. The study was published in the scientific journal magazine Earth and Environmental Science: Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (EESTRSE).
Fragments of a dinosaur skeleton were found and examined in the Guangling Formation of China’s Guizhou Province. The job of collecting the scattered bones took 10 years, and once completed, scientists were able to almost completely identify the creature.
Dinocephalosaurus grew up to three meters tall. More than half the lizard’s length (1.7 meters) was neck. Reptiles lived in shallow seas, hunting fish and cephalopods and attacking them by ambushing them.
Dinocephalosaurs were unique due to the large number of vertebrae in their necks and bodies, according to Stefan Spiekmann, an expert on long-necked marine lizards from the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart. Additionally, these animals did not lay eggs but gave birth to live offspring.
Paleontologists explained that despite its external similarities, the dinocephalosaur was not closely related to another famous long-necked marine dinosaur, the plesiosaur. Plesiosaurs appeared 40 million years after their predecessors.
Previous scientists determined Asia’s largest dinosaur during the Cretaceous period.