The soft tissue of a plesiosaur has been studied in detail for the first time, revealing that the marine reptiles, which lived during the age of dinosaurs and went extinct at the same time ...

The mix of features offers new clues to how plesiosaurs navigated prehistoric oceans. The tip of a right flipper of the new plesiosaur fossil, with two scales along the trailing edge. A new study ...

A small team of archaeologists, geologists, paleontologists and climate scientists has found that at least one type of plesiosaur had scales on its flippers similar to modern sea turtle species.

Plesiosaurs lived in the world's oceans for much of the Mesozoic Era (203-66 million years ago). These reptiles, which could grow up to 12 meters long, fed on fish and moved much like sea turtles ...

Millions of years ago, a long-necked marine predator with flippers dominated the seas. Plesiosaurs were marine reptiles that lived alongside dinosaurs and went extinct at the same time as them.

Plesiosaur skeleton. Image by eileenmak, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons The Mesozoic Era, often referred to as the ...

Scaly or smooth? That has long been one of paleontology’s enduring questions about the plesiosaur. While experts know details about its diet, size, and general habitat, the aquatic reptile’s ...

It's additionally possible that the hard scales could have helped the plesiosaurs maintain traction and avoid injury as they "bottom-walked" along the seabed while grazing on bottom-dwelling mollusks.

Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have examined fossilized soft tissue from a plesiosaur for the first time, revealing that the ancient marine reptile had both smooth and scaly skin. The study, ...