MOSCOW (Dispatches)-The fossil of a body of the size of a bus, a large skull over five feet in size, enormous sharp, conical teeth and an equally powerful jaw, topped by a beak- or snout-like feature, and four large flippers has been found in Russia that is a new species of pliosaur.
Pliosaurs were large predatory marine reptiles that lived at the same time as dinosaurs, though they perhaps showed up somewhat later, with the oldest fossils being dated to about 135 million years ago. They had a body shape that was unique among marine vertebrates at the time (though it looks something along the lines of a duck-billed platypus), including stiff trunks and a large variation in neck lengths among different species.
The new species from Russia has been named Luskhan itilensis and was described and published in a paper . The fossil of L. itilensis was found in August 2002 on the right bank of the Volga River in Russia, close to the city of Ulyanovsk. Accordingly, the name given to it means "master spirit from the Volga.”
"This is the most striking feature, as it suggests that pliosaurs colonized a much wider range of ecological niches than previously assumed,” Valentin Fischer of the Université de Liège, Belgium and lead author of the paper, said in a statement .