Dinosaurs were the dominant vertebrates that inhabited all the ecosystems of planet Earth for over 160 million years - from the Triassic period (about 230 million years ago) to the end of the Cretaceous period (about 65 million years ago). I want to acquaint you with a list of the ten most ferocious marine dinosaurs.

10 Shastasaurus

Shastasaurus (Shastasaurus) - a genus of dinosaurs that lived at the end of the Triassic period (more than 200 million years ago) in the territory of modern North America and, possibly, China. His remains have been found in California, British Columbia and the Chinese province of Guizhou. This predator is the largest marine reptile ever found on the planet. It could grow up to 21 meters in length and weigh 20 tons.

9 Dacosaurus

In ninth place in the ranking is Dakosaurus, a marine crocodile that lived in the late Jurassic - early Cretaceous period (more than 100.5 million years ago). It was a fairly large, carnivorous animal, adapted almost exclusively to hunting large prey. Can grow up to 6 meters in length.

8. Thalassomedon

Thalassomedon is a genus of dinosaurs that lived in North America about 95 million years ago. Most likely, it was the main predator of its time. Thalassomedon grew up to 12.3 m in length. The size of its flippers reached about 1.5–2 meters. The length of the skull was 47 centimeters, teeth - 5 cm. He ate fish.

7. Nothosaurus

Nothosaurus (Nothosaurus) is a marine lizard that lived 240-210 million years ago in the territory of modern Russia, Israel, China and North Africa. In length reached about 4 meters. It had webbed limbs, with five long fingers that could be used both for movement on land and for swimming. Probably ate fish. A complete Nothosaurus skeleton can be seen at the Natural History Museum in Berlin.

6. Tylosaurus

In sixth place in the list of the most ferocious marine dinosaurs is Tylosaurus (Tylosaurus) - a large marine predatory lizard that inhabited the oceans at the end of the Cretaceous period (about 88-78 million years ago). It was the dominant marine predator of its time. It grew up to 14 m in length. It fed on fish, large predatory sharks, small mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, and waterfowl.

5. Talattoarchon

Talattoarchon (Thalattoarchon) - a large marine reptile that lived more than 245 million years ago in what is now the western part of the United States. The remains, consisting of part of the skull, spine, pelvic bones, and part of the hind fins, were discovered in Nevada in 2010. According to estimates, talattoarchon was the top predator of his time. It grew to at least 8.6 m in length.

4. Tanystropheus

Tanystropheus is a genus of lizard-like reptiles that lived in the Middle Triassic about 230 million years ago. It grew up to 6 meters in length, and was distinguished by a very elongated and mobile neck, which reached 3.5 m. It led a predatory aquatic or semi-aquatic lifestyle, probably hunting fish and cephalopods near the coast.

3. Liopleurodon

Liopleurodon (Liopleurodon) - a genus of large carnivorous marine reptiles that lived at the turn of the middle and late Jurassic period (from about 165 million to 155 million years ago). It is assumed that the largest known Liopleurodon was just over 10 m in length, but typical sizes for it range from 5 to 7 m (according to other sources, 16-20 meters). Body weight is estimated at 1-1.7 tons. These apex predators probably ambushed large cephalopods, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, sharks, and other large animals they could catch.

2 Mosasaurus

Mosasaurus (Mosasaurus) is a genus of extinct reptiles that lived on the territory of modern Western Europe and North America during the Late Cretaceous - 70-65 million years ago. For the first time their remains were found in 1764 near the river Meuse. The total length of representatives of this genus ranged from 10 to 17.5 m. In appearance, they resembled a mixture of a fish (or a whale) with a crocodile. All the time they were in the water, plunging to a considerable depth. They ate fish, cephalopods, turtles and ammonites. According to some scientists, these predators are distant relatives of modern monitor lizards and iguanas.

1. Megalodon

Megalodon (Carcharocles megalodon) is an extinct species of prehistoric shark that lived throughout the oceans 28.1–3 million years ago. It is the largest known predatory fish in history. It is estimated that the megalodon reached 18 meters in length and weighed 60 tons. In body shape and behavior, it was similar to the modern white shark. He hunted cetaceans and other large marine animals. Interestingly, some cryptozoologists claim that this animal could have survived to the present, but apart from the found huge teeth (up to 15 cm in length), there is no other evidence that the shark still lives somewhere in the ocean.

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Any person imagines a dinosaur in the form of a ferocious lizard of terrifying size, baring its huge mouth and destroying everything in its path. Indeed, most of the ancient reptiles had a gigantic size that boggles the imagination. This is evidenced by numerous finds of individual fragments and even entire skeletons of fossil pangolins. However, not all dinosaurs were giants, among them there were separate species, which nature, as if in mockery, endowed with the growth of a chicken. These tiny creatures darted in numerous flocks among the thickets of relic ferns, trying not to get under the feet of their huge relatives and looking for even smaller prey.

Why, until recently, scientists knew so little about these amazing crumbs? It was their small stature that played a cruel joke on them. The bones of these dinosaurs were so light and fragile that they did not stand the test of time and practically did not survive to this day. Only a few finds allowed these small reptiles to make themselves known.

This pangolin has gained fame as the smallest predator of the Jurassic period. Its length did not exceed a meter, and its weight reached only two kilograms. He moved on fast hind legs, had a long tail and a movable head. The nimble dinosaur hunted insects and lizards. In total, three Compsognathus skeletons were found. Two of them were found on the territory of Europe in the middle of the nineteenth and at the end of the twentieth century, and one skeleton was preserved in Russia and was found quite recently, in 2010. Thanks to these findings, scientists were able to restore the appearance and habits of the fossil dinosaur.

Nkvebasaurus
The only fragment of the skeleton of this pangolin was found in 2000 in Africa, near the Sahara desert. Most likely the remains belonged to the cub. The structural features of these lizards include the presence of long fingers, which made it possible to capture prey. The so-called stomach stones, which are usually intended for grinding plant foods, have been preserved in the intestines. This allowed scientists to conclude that the nquebasaurs are omnivores. In length, the dinosaur did not exceed a meter and was a contemporary of Compsognathus.

Scipionyx
The perfectly preserved skeleton of this pangolin was found in Italy at the end of the twentieth century. The skeleton that belonged to a baby dinosaur pleased scientists with an extensive base for research, because the fossilized remains preserved the structure of not only the soft tissues of the animal, but also its internal organs. Most likely, the body of the lizard was covered with primitive feathers. He moved on his hind legs, supporting his body with the help of his tail. The size of adults, according to scientists, reached two meters. The dinosaur lived in the Cretaceous period and was a predator. In any case, scientists found lizards and fish among the undigested food residues.

Surprisingly, even 120 years ago, paleontologists believed that there were simply no dinosaurs in Russia. American paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh stated: "Russian dinosaurs, like the snakes of Ireland, are remarkable only in that they do not exist." However, further excavations did not confirm the statement of Charles Marsh, and by now Russian dinosaurs found quite a large number.

The main reason that far fewer dinosaur bones have been found in our country than in some other countries is the peculiarity of the landscape. Most of Russia is covered with dense and impenetrable forests. Archaeologists simply do not have the opportunity to cut down part of the forest to unearth the bones of prehistoric animals. Those areas that are free from forests and cultivated fields provide extremely scarce material. A hundred years ago, in Asia and America, where there are vast desert areas where there are neither forests nor cultivated fields, thousands of dinosaur bones and even entire dinosaur cemeteries were found. Compared to this, the finds even in modern Russia are more than scarce.

Another reason why Russian archaeologists have no luck with dinosaurs is the fact that in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, which were rich in dinosaur diversity, half of the territory of present-day Russia was covered by seas. According to scientists, there were no less dinosaurs on land than on the territory of present-day Canada, the USA or China, but their remains ended up in the zone of demolition of sediments from sand and clay, which dragged the bones into the seas and literally ground them into dust. Unlike the arid regions of the world, where most of the prehistoric pangolins were found, dinosaur bones in Russia suffered a rather deplorable fate. Even those bones that were well preserved in the ground were literally erased and destroyed from the glaciers that passed through the territory of Russia, and then the melt waters that formed from the melting glaciers came into play. As a result, the bones were broken, and subsequently blurred. This explains the paucity of finds on the territory of the largest country, which, it would seem, should have given a real "harvest" of a variety of dinosaurs.

However, not everything is so bad. All the negative factors that influenced the fossilized remains of dinosaurs could not completely destroy their traces and now we know several types of dinosaurs that lived in certain regions of our country.

Often the remains of dinosaurs are found by chance: during the development of rock, during mining, unexpected finds of ordinary people, erosion of bones by rivers and lakes, and so on. Unfortunately, few people pay attention to the bones that come across on the way, and often people just pass by. For example, paleontologist and writer Ivan Yefremov described his expedition to the Kazakh steppes in the 1920s as follows: "The whole day the horse walked over countless dinosaur bones." The bones covered territories of tens of kilometers. However, in those days, no one needed these skeletons; there were much more pressing issues in the country than the collection of bones of extinct animals. Fifty years later, the researchers went to the Kazakh steppes, but the cemetery was lost and a negligible amount of what Efremov described was found.

For a long time, archaeologists found only individual bones, vertebrae, parts of skulls. A complete dinosaur skeleton was only found in the 1990s. The dinosaur was found in the Far East in the hills near Kundur. turned out to be a hadrozvr, which was given the name Olorotitan Arharin (Olorotitan arharensis). This discovery was followed by others. The scientists finally got lucky. The Hadrosvars of these places are considered to be among the very last that existed on earth before the prehistoric lizards became extinct.

Several large dinosaur cemeteries have been found in the last twenty years. The main locations are beyond the Urals - in Kundur, Blagoveshchensk, Shestakov. Also, dinosaurs were found in Buryatia, Krasnoyarsk Territory, Yakutia, the Republic of Tuva, the Kemerovo Region, the Moscow Region. Finds in the Krasnoyarsk Territory are considered truly unique. Turtle shells, crocodile teeth, claws of dinosaurs that lived in the middle of the Jurassic period were found here. This bone deposit is unique in that the middle of the Jurassic period is considered a white spot all over the world. Very few traces of him have survived. Not surprisingly, new species of dinosaurs have been found here, including Stegosaurus and the dinosaur Kileskus (Kileskus aristotocus), which is considered the ancestor of tyrannosaurs.

What dinosaurs lived in Russia:

Ivantosaurus

Compsognathus

Kulindadromeus zabaikalsky

Olorotitan Arkharinsky

For a century, Russian dinosaurs have been playing hide-and-seek with scientists. Who won this exciting game?

“Russian dinosaurs, like the snakes of Ireland, are notable only for the fact that they do not exist,” said American paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh. 120 years ago, he came to the Russian Empire and was surprised to learn that not a single dinosaur bone was found in our country. That was incredible. Was there really no Mesozoic giants in the largest country in the world?

Russian scientists were not lucky with dinosaurs. These animals reigned on the planet in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, when half of the current territory of Russia was covered by shallow seas. Herds of lizards roamed inland. But their bones were not preserved - they ended up in the area of ​​sediment drift, from where sand and clay were dragged into the seas, to the burial places. Bones arrived there ground to dust.

Occasionally, on land, conditions were suitable for preserving the remains: the dinosaur drowned in a swamp or lake, or suffocated in layers of volcanic ash. But such burials were thoroughly destroyed over the past millions of years - glaciers passed through Russia, cutting off bedrock, and then melted glacial waters began to erode and break petrified bones.

Compared to the dinosaur cemeteries of Asia and America, where thousands of bones were dug up, it looked frankly meager: in Russia, only one single bone turned out to be dinosaur.
But this is not even the main reason for the failures that scientists had to endure. Everything that miraculously survived today is covered with forests, fields and is not available for study. Unlike the United States, Canada and China, Russia is not lucky: we do not have badlands - huge desert regions cut by gorges and canyons. All the preserved bones of Russian dinosaurs lie deep underground, it is very difficult to get them.

Occasionally, fossil remains come across in quarries, mines, along the banks of rivers and streams. Great luck if they are noticed in time and handed over to scientists. But luck was not enough for a long time. At the end of the 19th century, fragments of bones that could pass for dinosaurs were occasionally brought to Russian museums. Strange ribs were found in the gravel with which the Kursk road was paved. A piece of bone was delivered from Volyn-Podolia. An unusual vertebra was dug up in the Southern Urals. Accidentally mined was described as the remains of dinosaurs, but later it turned out that these were the bones of crocodiles, marine reptiles, and even amphibians.

However, even such finds were few - they would all fit in a small basket. Compared to the dinosaur cemeteries of Asia and America, where thousands of bones were dug up, it looked frankly meager: in Russia, only one single bone turned out to be dinosaur. A small fragment of the lizard's foot was dug up in the Chita region near a coal mine. Paleontologist Anatoly Ryabinin described it in 1915 under the name Allosaurus sibiricus, although it was impossible to determine from one bone which dinosaur it belonged to. It is clear that the predatory - and that's all.

Soon more valuable remains were found. True, two curiosities happened to them at once. Once an Amur Cossack lieutenant colonel noticed that fishermen were knitting strange weights on their nets - long stones with a hole in the middle. The fishermen said that they collect them on the banks of the Amur, where a high cliff is eroded. According to them, it turned out that the entire beach was covered with stone knuckles.

This was reported to the Academy of Sciences. An expedition was organized, which, right before the revolution, delivered more than a ton of petrified remains to St. Petersburg. A large skeleton was assembled from them, describing it as a new species of duck-billed dinosaur. The lizard was given the name "Amur Manchurosaurus" (Mandschurosaurus amurensis). True, evil tongues called him a gypsosaurus, because he lacked many bones - they were molded from plaster. The skull, the most important part of the skeleton, was also plaster, with only a piece of the braincase being real. Later it became clear that the original bones belong to different species and genera of lizards.

Now almost none of the paleontologists recognizes the Manchurosaurs. The irony also lies in the fact that the bones were collected on the right, Chinese bank of the Amur. So the "hypsosaurus" should not be considered Russian, but rather Chinese.

Curiosity came out with the second skeleton. Japanese paleontologists dug up the lizard in the coal mines of Sakhalin and named the Sakhalin nipponosaurus (Nipponosaurus sachalinensis). It was in the 1930s, when, after the defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War, Japan owned the island. Fifteen years later, Sakhalin again became Russian, but the dinosaur remained "Japanese". And more remains of dinosaurs were not found here.

The search for dinosaurs in Russia and the Soviet Union remained unsuccessful for a long time. It got ridiculous. In the late 1920s, a paleontological expedition headed to the southern outskirts of the Soviet Union, to the Kazakh steppes. “All day long the horse walked over countless dinosaur bones,” recalled its participant, paleontologist and science fiction writer Ivan Yefremov. The bones covered vast areas of tens of kilometers. But not a single skeleton or skull was found - only fragments of bones.

“They didn’t know how to study them then, no one collected them,” says paleontologist Alexander Averyanov. Only half a century later, experts learned to identify extinct animals from fragmentary remains. But then the huge cemetery of dinosaurs in Kazakhstan had already been lost.

Then, for several years, Soviet paleontologists worked in the Kara-Tau mountains of Kazakhstan, where layers of gray shales occur. These mountains contain a great variety of fish, plant and insect prints from the Jurassic period. Unique skeletons of ancient salamanders, turtles, full prints of pterosaurs, and a bird feather were found here. The remains of almost all the inhabitants of the Jurassic lake and those who inhabited its shores were found. And again - no dinosaurs, although the Jurassic period was the time of their heyday ...

In the first half of the last century, numerous burials of Permian animal lizards, Devonian fish, and Triassic amphibians were discovered on the territory of Russia. The paleontological labs had everything from fossil insects to mammoth carcasses. Everything, except for the notorious diva-lizards - this is how Ivan Efremov called dinosaurs in the Russian manner.

Only in 1953 did paleontologists get really lucky. On the high bank of the Kemerovo River Kiya near the village of Shestakovo, geologists came across a skull and an incomplete skeleton of a small, dog-sized psittacosaurus, which was called Siberian (Psittacosaurus sibiricus).

The skeleton was delivered to Moscow. A paleontological expedition was immediately dispatched to Kuzbass, but luck turned away from the scientists again. They did not find any remains - the water was high that summer, the layer with the bones was flooded.

Three years later, at the request of Efremov, an expedition of Kemerovo schoolchildren went to Shestakovo, headed by Gennady Prashkevich, a well-known writer, poet, and translator in the future. The guys then collected a whole box of bones, but, as it turned out in Moscow, they all belonged to mammoths and bison. Only half a century later, several more dinosaur bones were found in Shestakovo, including huge, like a bucket, sauropod vertebrae.

Everything was no less complicated with the locations of dinosaurs in the Far East. In the 1950s, an expedition from the Paleontological Institute tried to find dinosaurs in Blagoveshchensk. Excavations yielded nothing but a handful of scattered bones. It was decided that the bones were redeposited here: once whole skeletons were broken by water, after which the fragments were carried away to another place. A cross was put on the site. As it turned out later - in vain.

The lizards found in the Far East turned out to be very interesting - they are one of the last dinosaurs that lived on the planet.
In the late 1990s, a road was being laid in the hills near Kundur, and in one of the construction trenches, the son of geologist Yuri Bolotsky saw small vertebrae lying like a chain, one next to the other. It turned out to be the tail of a hadrosaur. Gradually digging up the remains, geologists uncovered a complete skeleton. The lizard was named Arharin Olorotitan (Olorotitan arharensis). The first discovery was followed by others.

Now excavations are carried out annually in the Far East, mainly in Blagoveshchensk. The local lizards turned out to be very interesting - they are one of the last dinosaurs that lived on the planet. They lived literally at the end of the great extinction. The study of Russian dinosaurs in general has advanced greatly in the last twenty years. Found a dozen large locations, managed to find valuable remains in the previously known places of finds. The main burial places of Russian dinosaurs are located beyond the Urals - in Kundur, Blagoveshchensk, Shestakov.

A unique place was discovered on the banks of the Kakanaut River in the Koryak Highlands - this is the northernmost point of discovery of dinosaurs on the planet. Bones of seven families and egg shells of at least two dinosaur species have been found here. Remains of Cretaceous lizards have also been found in Buryatia (localities of Murtoy and Krasny Yar) and the Krasnoyarsk Territory (Bolshoy Kemchug). Dinosaurs of the Jurassic period have been found in Yakutia (Teete) and in the Tyva Republic (Kalbak-Kyry).

A small burial of Jurassic reptiles was also discovered near the city of Sharypovo in the Krasnoyarsk Territory. Local historian Sergei Krasnolutsky came up with the idea: since dinosaurs were found in the neighboring Kemerovo region, they can also be found here, in the Krasnoyarsk Territory. In search of bones, he went to a coal quarry.

For a long time nothing came across, but finally the local historian saw broken turtle shells. There were so many of them that this layer was later called turtle soup. And nearby were bone plaques and teeth of crocodiles, long curved claws of dinosaurs that lived in the middle of the Jurassic period.

This time is practically a "blank spot" in the evolution of terrestrial life. Very few traces of him have survived. It is not surprising that the excavations in Sharypovo, which have been going on for several years, have led to the discovery of new animals. Among them are the as yet undescribed stegosaurus and the carnivorous dinosaur kilesk (Kileskus aristotocus), a distant ancestor of the famous tyrannosaurs.

In the western part of Russia there are no burials with intact skeletons and skulls of dinosaurs. Here, primarily in the Volga region and the Belgorod region, mostly scattered remains come across - individual vertebrae, teeth or fragments of bones.

An interesting find was made a hundred kilometers from Moscow, near the Peski railway station, in a quarry where white limestones are mined. Jurassic sinkholes are found in these quarries. In the early 1990s, bulldozers unearthed a whole chain of ancient caves. 175 million years ago, an underground river flowed in them, originating in the lake. The river carried the remains of animals, tree branches, and plant spores underground. For several years, paleontologists have managed to collect numerous turtle shells, bones of amphibians, crocodiles and ancient mammals, fish skeletons, freshwater shark spikes and the remains of predatory coelurosaurs (Coelurosauria). These dinosaurs probably reached about three meters in length, although the bones found were small: teeth the size of a fingernail and a claw smaller than a matchstick.

Gradually, the picture of the life of Russian marvelous lizards becomes more and more complete. Surely new graves will be discovered. Yes, and those that have long been known, constantly bring surprises in the form of bones of previously unknown dinosaurs. Othniel Charles Marsh, who assured that there were no Russian dinosaurs, concluded his statement with the words that sooner or later the remains of these animals would be found in Russia. The American paleontologist was right, although the wait was long.