More About Tylosaurus

Tylosaurus was among the largest of all the mosasaurs, along with Hainosaurus and Mosasaurus, reaching maximum lengths of 49 feet (15 metres) and weighing around 7 tons. It had a sleek body and long, narrow, muscular jaws and a blunt, powerful head from which it takes its name and which may have been used to ram and stun prey and also used in intraspecific combat. It had agile flippers and a flexible fin on the end of its long tail.

Tylosaurus was a carnivore and fed up on fish, turtles and other reptiles. Stomach contents associated with specimens of Tylosaurus indicate that this ferocious mosasaur had a varied diet which also included sharks, smaller mosasaurs, plesiosaurs and flightless diving birds such as Hesperornis.

In some paleoenviroments, Tylosaurus seems to have preferred shallow, nearshore waters (as with the Eutaw Formation and Mooreville Chalk of Alabama), while favouring deeper water further out from shore in other environments (as with the Niobrara Chalk of the western U.S.).

Tylosaurus figured in the famous 19th-century feud between the famous paleontologists Othniel C. Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope (commonly known as the 'Bone Wars'). Arguing over a set of incomplete Tylosaurus fossils, Marsh suggested the name Rhinosaurus ('nose lizard') while Cope touted Rhamposaurus instead. It was left to a third famous paleontologist, Charles Sternberg, to make the most amazing Tylosaurus discovery of all, a specimen with the fossilized remains of an unidentified plesiosaur in its stomach.