Mini sea monster had teeth as sharp as a saw blade - Livescience.com

A sea monster with teeth so sharp they formed a "saw-like blade," swam in the waters of what is now Morocco about 66 million years ago, a new study finds.

Miners discovered the remains of this creature — a lizard-like marine reptile called a mosasaur that lived during the dinosaur age — at the Sidi Chennane phosphate mine in Morocco's Khouribga province.

Once researchers examined the specimen, they noticed its unique teeth, which had features never before seen in any other known reptile, living or extinct, the researchers said. .

In honor of the predator's deadly yet odd pearly whites, the team named the mosasaur Xenodens calminechari, whose genus name means "strange tooth" in Greek and Latin, and whose species name translates to "like a saw" in Arabic.

Its closely packed knife-like teeth gave X.

"A huge diversity of mosasaurs lived here," study lead researcher Nick Longrich, a senior lecturer at the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom, said in a statement.

"Some were giant, deep-diving predators like modern sperm whales, others with huge teeth and growing up to 10 meters [32 feet] long, were top predators like orcas, still others ate shellfish like modern sea otters — and then there was the strange little Xenodens.".

"A mosasaur with shark teeth is a novel adaptation of mosasaurs so surprising that it looked like a fantastic creature out of an artist's imagination," study senior researcher Nour-Eddine Jalil, a paleontologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and Cadi Ayyad University in Marrakesh, Morocco, said in the statement.

calminechari also adds evidence that the marine reptile ecosystem, as well as diversity, in Morocco was thriving at the end of the Cretaceous