Product Description
This Mosasaurus 4 1/2" figure includes hand painted features to give it realistic details that are true to natural anatomy. This figure is considered a museum quality replica. Highest Quality Natural Rubber.
Mosasaurus (/ˌmoʊzəˈsɔːrəs/; "lizard of the Meuse River") is the type genus (defining example) of the mosasaurs, an extinct group of aquatic squamate reptiles. It lived from about 82 to 66 million years ago during the Campanian and Maastrichtian stages of the Late Cretaceous. The genus was one of the first Mesozoic marine reptiles known to science—the first fossils of Mosasaurus were found as skulls in a chalk quarry near the Dutch city of Maastricht in the late 18th century, and were initially thought to be the bones of crocodiles or whales. One skull discovered around 1780, which was seized by France during the French Revolutionary Wars for its scientific value, was famously nicknamed the "great animal of Maastricht". In 1808, naturalist Georges Cuvier concluded that it belonged to a giant marine lizard with similarities to monitor lizards but otherwise unlike any known living animal. This concept was revolutionary at the time and helped support the then-developing ideas of extinction. Cuvier did not designate a scientific name for the new animal, and this was done by William Daniel Conybeare in 1822 when he named it Mosasaurus in reference to its origin in fossil deposits near the Meuse River. The exact affinities of Mosasaurus as a squamate remain controversial, and scientists continue to debate whether its closest living relatives are monitor lizards or snakes.
The fossils also form a part of French revolutionary history in that French forces seized them from the Fortress of Maastricht in the Netherlands where they were then transported to France. An additional bit of trivia: the Maastrichtian age of the Cretaceous (which Mosasaurus is known from) is named after the Maastricht region. The story of how the remains were captured and the resulting legal challenges in the later years of the eighteenth century is often mentioned but exact details are hard to verify, and the story seems to have developed through a combination of ideas about what happened coming together to form a sequence of events that may not have happened exactly as told.
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