Meet Kourisodon: The Fierce "Razor Tooth" Mosasaur on Display at the Courtenay Museum!

Probably new to you (and me :-))!

#Kourisodon, “razor tooth,” on display at the incredibly cool @CourtenayMuseum on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada.

This sinister #mosasaur is named after the Puntledge River that cuts into the Pender Formation. Time-wise, it is the equivalent to the extremely well-known Niobara Formation of Western Interior Seaway fame.

North America was bisected by the Western Interior Seaway (WIS) during the Late #Cretaceous. The western landmass is called Laramidia, the eastern Appalachia, and the water between the WIS.

Thus, in #Cretaceous Laramidia (today’s western North America), this species lived in what we’d think of as the Pacific today, making the WIS the equivalent of the Atlantic as it made up Laramidia’s eastern border.

The Vancouver Island fauna shares similarities with Japanese specimens, in fact a species of Kourisodon has been suggested to have lived in Japan.

The two water bodies have similar-style creatures, but mostly of different genera. The turtle #Desmatochelys is present on both sides of Laramidia, as seems the giant mosasaur #Tylosaurus, but the remaining taxa appear to be different genera.

A tough part about researching marine (and aerial) critters is the large ones easily travel huge distances. If we found a humpback whale skeleton 6,000 miles from another, would we right away say “oh this is the same species,” or would we think each is a local species and surely must be different? Thus the power and import of comparative anatomy :-)

The paper naming this cool critter noted a tremendous disparity between the two coasts in that the west coast had no #polycotylid #plesiosaurs, all of them were of the #elasmosaur variety (which I’ll cover soon ;-)). I love testable (via collecting) hypotheses like these.

I enjoyed this line, “In fact, had only the front limb, dorsal skull roof and quadrate been found, we would have had no trouble referring this specimen to #Clidastes.” The edentulous dentary prow and laterally compressed, blade-like teeth separate it to these authors at the genus level.

#FossilCrates

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