ANIMAL
Scientists in Japan have unearthed the near-complete remains of an ancient great white shark-sized sea monster that likely terrorised the ancient oceans it used to inhabit. The prehistoric predator, which the researchers have named ‘blue dragon’, has an unusual body plan that sets it apart from its extinct relatives and is unlike any living creature. The exceptional fossils, which are around 72 million years old, were discovered along the Aridagawa River in Wakayama Prefecture on Honshu island. They belong to a never-before-seen species of mosasaur, a group of air-breathing aquatic reptiles that were apex marine predators during the Cretaceous period, 145 to 66 million years ago. The “astounding” remains are the most complete mosasaur fossils ever uncovered in Japan and the northwest Pacific.
In a recent study, researchers named the new mosasaur Megapterygius wakayamaensis. The new genus Megapterygius translates to ‘large-winged’ after the creature’s unusually large rear flippers, and the species name wakayamaensis recognises the prefecture where it was found. The team nicknamed the creature the Wakayama soryu – a soryu is a blue-coloured aquatic dragon from Japanese mythology. Mosasaurs share a similar body plan and there is very little variation among species. But M. wakayamaensis is something of an outlier, which has surprised scientists. “I thought I knew them [mosasaurs] quite well by now,” said Takuya Konishi, a vertebrate palaeontologist at the University of Cincinnati. “Immediately, [I knew] it was something I had never seen before.”
Like other mosasaurs, M. wakayamaensis had a dolphin-like torso with four paddle-like flippers, an alligator-shaped snout and a long tail. But it also had
