Pistosaurus Pronunciation

Fun Facts

• ✓Pistosaurus lived approximately 241 to 237 million years ago, predating the first dinosaurs by several million years, making it one of the oldest large marine reptiles ever discovered.
• ✓Its skull looks almost exactly like a nothosaur, a smaller semi-aquatic cousin, but its body and flippers are nearly identical to the giant plesiosaurs that would come tens of millions of years later, making Pistosaurus a critical evolutionary bridge between two very different groups.
• ✓Scientists call Pistosaurus an 'underwater flyer' because it did not wiggle its tail like a fish to move through water, but instead rowed and soared with four broad flippers the same way a sea turtle or penguin does today.
• ✓Both halves of Pistosaurus come from different fossil specimens: the skull is known primarily from French fossils while the postcranial skeleton, meaning everything from the neck down, was found in German Muschelkalk deposits, and it took decades for paleontologists to realize they belonged to the same animal.
• ✓Pistosaurus had teeth designed like interlocking spikes, suggesting it could snap shut on slippery fish or squid without letting anything wriggle free, a trick still used by modern gharials and river dolphins 240 million years later.