In Norse mythology, a monstrous sea serpent wrapped itself world wide’s waters. Its title was Jormungandr.
The traditional Norse additionally believed in a spot known as Valhalla, or heaven. And in North Dakota, there’s a small city known as Walhalla, a reputation that displays the realm’s Scandinavian heritage.
It was close to there {that a} new type of mosasaur, a kind of large sea creature, was found, scientists introduced final week. They named it Jormungandr walhallaensis.
Jormungandr walhallaensis, which lived about 80 million years in the past, has been deemed a brand new species and genus of mosasaur, an historical lineage of marine reptile predators that dwelled the Earth’s waters virtually way back to 100 million years in the past.
“There loads of papers revealed on dinosaurs yearly, however not very many papers revealed on mosasaurs yearly as a result of there simply aren’t very many individuals on this planet engaged on them,” mentioned Michael Caldwell, a number one mosasaur professional and a organic science professor on the College of Alberta in Canada who didn’t work on the invention.
Mosasaurs have been basically large lizards with flippers that allowed them to stay within the sea, with some species rising as giant as 60 ft.
They went extinct concurrently the dinosaurs.
Amelia Zietlow, a doctoral scholar on the Richard Gilder Graduate Faculty on the American Museum of Pure Historical past and the lead writer of the brand new examine, mentioned Jormungandr walhallaensis bears a singular mixture of physiological traits from what is probably the most effective identified mosasaur genus, the school-bus measurement mosasaurus (depicted, nonetheless outsized, within the film “Jurassic World”) and its smaller, extra primitive predecessor, the clidastes.
An evaluation run by laptop software program yielded no precise match for the fossil within the mosasaur fossil file, main Ms. Zietlow and her co-authors to conclude that their fossil was not solely a brand new species, however a wholly new genus that sits someplace between clidastes and mosasaurus within the mosasaur lineage.
Nevertheless, there’s wholesome debate over this level.
“Do I essentially agree that it’s a brand new genus and species?” Dr. Caldwell mentioned. “Properly, no I don’t. However these are form of the scientific quibbles, proper?”
It’s extra seemingly, Dr. Caldwell mentioned, that the fossil described within the examine is solely a brand new species of the clidastes genus. Below this view, it might take the title Clidastes walhallaensis.
Nonetheless, the paper provides “extraordinarily beneficial” knowledge for future analysis to contemplate as the sector develops what remains to be a fledgling understanding of the evolution of mosasaurs, Dr. Caldwell mentioned.
Although Ms. Zietlow and her co-authors solely had Jormungandr walhallaensis’s cranium and jaw to research, they have been capable of glean necessary particulars about the way it lived and died.
Jormungandr walhallaensis in all probability measured 18 to 24 ft lengthy, Ms. Zietlow mentioned.
The form of its tooth point out that it preyed on fish and different small creatures when it prowled the Western Inside Seaway, which cut up North America in half via the Midwestern states in the course of the late Cretaceous Interval.
A number of the animal’s vertebrae present tooth marks that seem unhealed, Ms. Zietlow mentioned, suggesting that it had been attacked by one other animal, presumably even one other mosasaur, not lengthy earlier than it died.
The truth that the remainder of the skeleton was lacking when it was found means that it could have been eaten.
Ms. Zietlow hopes her work on Jormungandr walhallaensis will spark curiosity in mosasaurs, which she known as understudied regardless of collections of their fossils in museums throughout the continent.
“Of the 4,000 mosasaurs in North America,” Ms. Zietlow defined, “solely about 5 p.c of them have been included within the scientific literature.”