Names of underwater dinosaurs. The largest marine dinosaurs

An unimaginable event occurred about 251 million years ago, which significantly influenced subsequent eras. The name given by scientists to this event is the Permian-Tertiary extinction, or Great Extinction.

It became the formative boundary between the two geological periods- Permian and Triassic, or, in other words, between the Paleozoic and Mesozoic. It took a little time for most of the sea and terrestrial species.

These events contributed to the establishment of a group of archosaurs on land (the most prominent representatives– dinosaurs) etc. "sea dinosaurs"

Because It would be incorrect to call dinosaurs marine; we put such a phrase as “sea dinosaurs” in quotation marks and ask you to be lenient towards such an “amateurish” definition later in the article (editor’s note).

Marine reptiles inhabited the aquatic territories of the Mesozoic along with land dinosaurs. They also disappeared at the same time - about 65.5 million years ago. The cause was the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction.

In this article we would like to introduce you to a selection of the 10 most striking and ferocious representatives of “sea dinosaurs”.

Shastasaurus is a genus of “dinosaurs” that existed more than 200 million years ago – the end of the Triassic period. According to scientists, their habitat was the territory of modern North America and China.

The remains of Shastasaurs have been found in California, British Columbia and the Chinese province of Guizhou.

Shastasaurus belongs to the ichthyosaurs - sea ​​predators, similar to modern dolphins. Being the largest reptile in water, individuals could grow to unimaginable sizes: body length - 21 meters, weight - 20 tons.

But, despite their large size, Shastasaurs were not exactly terrible predators. They ate by sucking and ate mainly fish.

Dakosaurus – saltwater crocodiles, who lived more than 100.5 million years ago: Late Jurassic - Early Cretaceous.

The first remains were discovered in Germany, and later their habitat expanded from England to Russia and Argentina.

Dakosaurs were large, carnivorous animals. The maximum length of the body, reptilian and fish-like at the same time, did not exceed 6 meters.

Scientists who have studied the structure of the teeth of this species believe that the dracosaurus was the main predator during its period of residence.

Dracosaurs hunted exclusively for large prey.

Thalassomedon are “dinosaurs” belonging to the pliosaur group. Translated from Greek - “lord of the sea.” They lived 95 million years ago in the territory of the North. America.

The body length reached 12.5 meters. Huge flippers, which allowed him to swim at incredible speeds, could grow up to 2 meters. The size of the skull was 47 cm, and the teeth were approximately 5 cm. The main diet was fish.

The dominance of these predators remained until the late Cretaceous period, and ceased only with the advent of mosasaurs.

Nothosaurus – " sea ​​lizards"that existed in Triassic- about 240-210 million years ago. They were found in Russia, Israel, China, and North Africa.

Scientists believe that nothosaurs are relatives of pliosaurs, another type of deep-sea predator.

Nothosaurs were extremely aggressive predators, and their body reached a length of up to 4 m. The limbs were webbed. There were 5 long fingers, intended for both movement on land and swimming.

The teeth of predators were sharp, directed outward. Most likely, nothosaurs ate fish and squid. It is believed that they attacked from ambush, using their sleek, reptilian physique to stealthily approach the food, thereby catching it by surprise.

A full-fledged skeleton of the notosaurus is in the Museum natural history, Berlin.

Sixth place on our list of “sea dinosaurs” is Tylosaurus.

Tylosaurus is a species of mosasaurus. A large predatory “lizard” that lived in the oceans 88-78 million years ago - the end of the Cretaceous period.

Huge Tylosaurs reached 15 meters in length, thus being the apex predators of their time.

The diet of tylosaurs was varied: fish, large predatory sharks, small mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, waterfowl.

Thalattoarchon is a marine reptile that existed during the Triassic period - 245 million years ago.

The first fossils discovered in Nevada in 2010 gave scientists new insights into the ecosystem's rapid recovery after the Great Dying.

The found skeleton - part of the skull, spine, pelvic bones, part of the hind fins - was the size of a school bus: about 9 m in length.

Thalattoarchon was an apex predator, growing up to 8.5 m.

Tanystropheus are lizard-like reptiles that existed 230 - 215 million years ago - the Middle Triassic period.

Tanystropheus grew up to 6 meters in length, had a 3.5-meter elongated and mobile neck.

They were not exclusively aquatic inhabitants: most likely, they could lead both an aquatic and semi-aquatic lifestyle, hunting near the shore. Tanystropheus were predators that ate fish and cephalopods.

Liopleurodon are large carnivorous marine reptiles. They lived about 165-155 million years ago - the boundary between the middle and late Jurassic period.

Typical dimensions of Liopleurodon are 5-7 meters in length, weight - 1-1.7 tons. It is believed that the most famous large representative was more than 10 meters in length.

Scientists believe that the jaws of these reptiles reached 3 m.

During its period, Liopleurodon was considered an apex predator, dominating the food chain.

They hunted from ambush. They fed on cephalopods, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, sharks and other large animals.

Mosasaurus - reptiles of the late Cretaceous period - 70-65 million years ago. Habitat: territory of modern Western Europe, North America.

The first remains were discovered in 1764 near the Meuse River.

Appearance Mosasaurus is a mixture of a whale, a fish and a crocodile. There were hundreds of sharp teeth.

They preferred to eat fish, cephalopods, turtles and ammonites.

Research by scientists suggests that mosasaurs may be distant relatives of modern monitor lizards and iguanas.

The first place is rightfully taken prehistoric shark, considered a truly terrible creature.

Carcharocles lived 28.1-3 million ago - the Cenozoic era.

This is one of the largest predators in the history of marine life. It is considered the ancestor of the great white shark - the most terrible and powerful predator today.

The body length reached up to 20 m, and the weight reached 60 tons.

Megalodons hunted cetaceans and other large aquatic animals.

An interesting fact is that some cryptozoologists believe that this predator could have survived to the present day. But, fortunately, apart from the huge 15-centimeter teeth found, there is no other evidence.

When dinosaur bones were found in bags in the USA and Canada, in Russia they could not boast of at least one or two vertebrae of ancient animals. The fact is that during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, the territory of present-day Russia was flooded with shallow seas. Dinosaurs lived here too, but finding their remains turned out to be more difficult - water and stones ground their bones into dust. The skeletons were preserved in swamps and volcanic ash, but glaciers drilled the earth into mush, and glacial waters eroded what was left. But Russian scientists have adapted to such difficult conditions. Now scattered dinosaur bones are found on Far East, and in the Moscow region. This is done professionally by Pavel Skuchas, Candidate of Biological Sciences, specialist in Mesozoic vertebrates, Associate Professor at St. Petersburg State University. Pavel described a new genus of giant dinosaurs - Tengrisaurs, and then a new dinosaur - Sibirotitan, walking around the territory modern Russia 120 million years ago. Agata Korovina talked to Pavel about what dinosaurs we eat for dinner, what Mickey Mouse and amphibians have in common, how humans will change in the future, and whether we will one day be able to herd a dinosaur in our backyard.

If a paleontologist walks through the forest with a girl who is not a paleontologist, what does he see, what will he tell her, given his professional deformation?

If a girl is a biologist, then you can afford a lot... Dinosaurs have a striking feature - their legs are located under the body, slender, while a lizard, for example, has everything sticking out to the side, and it waddles around. And you can give a girl a compliment: “Your legs are like a dinosaur.” The unsavvy one will hit you in the face, but the savvy one will be glad that it’s a good pair, the sagittal alignment of the limbs.

- What about around? We see forest belts, cramps, cliffs, but what do you see?

The brain reacts to quarries, especially when you are traveling on a train. You immediately remember the geological map, the age of the rocks. Sometimes paleontologists jump off the train, run and find interesting things. And the second thing, when you come back from an expedition, it’s very good to look for mushrooms afterwards. It's easier than dice. Because bones are sometimes one centimeter, teeth - one and a half to two millimeters.

- What kind of superpower? How do you find them?

There is a special approach. Bone-bearing rock is collected, ideally some kind of sand or sandstone. A small handful is thrown into a sieve, and you begin to carefully rinse it in water. Small grains of sand and mud float away, leaving stones and bones. And this is where you start to choose. When the eye is trained, one and a half to two millimeters of a tooth is normal, you find it. To find something from the Jurassic period, eyes alone are no longer enough. What remains in the sieve is dried, and then we examine it under a microscope.

- You reconstructed Tengrisaurus using several vertebrae. How is this possible?

Reconstruction of the appearance of fossil organisms from small remains, for example from two vertebrae, is very approximate. The closest relatives of this dinosaur are identified, for which a complete skeleton is known. You can understand whether the dinosaur was 10-12 meters, as in the case of our Siberian sauropod dinosaurs, or whether it was a giant. Scientists rely on published articles. Sometimes more than one hundred or two hundred signs are used to clarify family relationships.

- But there will still be a difference: a different jaw, different muscles...

Indeed, therefore, any reconstruction based on an incomplete skeleton is a convention and an assumption.

When paleontologists describe isolated bones in their works, they do not reconstruct the external appearance. This is already the prerogative of people who are interested in paleontology.

It’s great that several wonderful paleoillustrators and paleoartists have appeared in Russia. One of them, for example, is Andrey Atuchin.

The voice of some dinosaurs has been reconstructed. There is a group of dinosaurs that lived at the end of the Cretaceous period, they are called duck-billed dinosaurs, or hadrosaurs. They were herbivores, quite peaceful, although large, 5–6 meters, walked on their hind legs, and the males had hollow ridges on their heads that connected to the nasopharynx. The idea arose that this was a resonator. They created a model, blew it, and got some sound. It's hardly a perfect match because we have to take soft tissue into account, but we still have a rough idea of ​​how dinosaurs screamed.

- Why did these three vertebrae remain, what happened to the rest of the skeleton?

Fossils, especially those of Mesozoic age, were often preserved under very specific conditions. Usually this is a body of water: lake, river, sea. There is a current in the river, so skeletons in river sediments are usually not preserved, they are carried away by the water, they begin to fall apart, and isolated remains are found here.

The desert is ideal for a paleontologist. We worked in Uzbekistan, there are wonderful outcrops of ancient rocks, and dinosaur bones can be collected like mushrooms.

We have forests. You can find something on the banks of rivers where cliffs form, or in active or abandoned quarries. For example, coal is mined, and on top there are layers containing the remains of dinosaurs. This also happens.

When I talked with, they said that they describe their finds, and photograph, and sketch, and make computer models- because they don’t know what will be important later, because they might miss something now. Do you have something you're not sure about but you just keep it?

Of course, this especially works with isolated residues. There are still bones, we don’t understand whose they are. In the Krasnoyarsk Territory they found very small vertebrae with lancet- and diamond-shaped processes - there is nothing similar in the modern fauna. We can't even identify the group. We only understand that this is some kind of reptile. I showed at conferences: “Colleagues, please, what is this?” (this is normal practice when the paleontologist does not understand anything at all). And still no one has said anything. But we published an article, and when, for example, in the UK they find the skeleton of an animal with the same processes on its vertebrae, they will immediately remember our find, and the problem will be solved. If you cannot solve a problem, set this task to everyone - let everyone think.

- Where in Russia can you find dinosaur bones?

You can list them on the fingers of one hand. Unique place- Chebulinsky district in Kemerovo region. There are a lot of river sediments there, and there is the Shestakovo site, where entire skeletons have been preserved. Other places - surroundings of the city of Blagoveshchensk in the Far East, south Krasnoyarsk Territory, Chita region. The bones in Shestakovo are very fragile.

Even if you find a skeleton and start picking with your finger, everything will quickly fall apart. Specialists had to soak each bone with a special glue. The skeleton is not pulled out of the rock, the rock is coated with plaster and boarded up with boards, this is called “taking with a monolith,” and taken to the laboratory, where it is then cleared.

- How did it happen that dinosaur bones are in Great Britain, and in the Chebulinsky region, and in Antarctica?

The configuration of the continents is constantly changing. When the dawn of the dinosaurs began, the Jurassic period, all the continents were united into a single supercontinent - Pangea. And the composition of faunas in different parts globe was very similar. The mid-Jurassic fauna of Great Britain and Western Siberia are virtually identical, and these are great distances. Then Pangea split into the northern continent - Laurasia, which included Europe, Asia and North America, and Gondwana - a group of southern continents. Strange creatures have always lived in Gondwana. They penetrated there from Laurasia and evolved there completely independently of other regions.

- What are the specifics of our “Russian” dinosaur? How is it different from the rest?

He is not much different from others. But it is very evolutionarily advanced, that is, it is already a complex sauropod. Giant sauropod dinosaurs, when viewed from afar, are approximately all of the same type: long neck and tail, four legs, large sizes, and then there are some variations: for example, how the teeth were arranged; in primitive ones they are in the form of spoons, that is, with an extension so that bite branches, for more advanced ones - in the form of pencils. Ours is something intermediate between spoons and pencils.

- Was there no protection?

When you are 10–12 meters, no one is afraid of you anymore. The main task of sauropods is to grow to these sizes as quickly as possible. There were sauropods even up to 30 meters, while predators usually grew up to seven meters.

- Why didn’t predators evolve into superpredators?

This is very unprofitable. And 20-meter predators have never existed. Vegetation, apparently, was enough to feed even such giants as sauropods. Predators always have a problem - they need to hunt. Hunting is a big waste of energy. The larger the predator, the more meat it needs.

Predators are very vulnerable, this can be seen even in modern lions and tigers. For example, if a tyrannosaurus breaks a leg while attacking a victim, that’s it, it’s death, because it won’t be able to feed anymore.

be very large predator extremely difficult. Even the Tyrannosaurus rex would hardly have climbed on a giant sauropod, because he understood that the cost of a mistake was very high. Plus some other life experience, because dinosaurs were clearly no more stupid than birds.

- Which dinosaurs have survived to this day?

Only birds. Crocodiles are modern cousins ​​of dinosaurs. Both of them belong to the group of archosaurs. “Archo” means “highest”; archosaurs are the highest lizards.

But from the behavior of modern birds and crocodiles, one can understand how dinosaurs behaved. There is even such a method - bracketing. If crocodiles have complex behavior - caring for offspring, displaying during the mating season, if birds have this, then dinosaurs had it too.

In Mongolia, they even found a dinosaur in the mother hen position.

- When you eat grilled chicken, do you think you're eating a dinosaur?

I thought before. Previously, even with children who are interested in paleontology, we had a separate lesson on the anatomy of dinosaurs, where we ate grilled chicken. Yes, indeed, one to one, not much has changed.

- There was a period when a horse could be carried away by birds of prey. What kind of time is this?

This is the beginning of the Cenozoic era. Before this was the end of the Cretaceous period, most dinosaurs became extinct, with the exception of birds. The niche of large flightless running predators is empty. Mammals, it seems, have been in some kind of awesome state for several million years - where are these predatory guys? They continued to be quite small. But large predatory animals appeared flightless birds and large crocodiles. Those birds' wings were reduced, and they themselves were about two meters tall. They looked a little like an ostrich: powerful legs, small wings, only a half-meter beak. And the horse was the size of a dog. The bird could kill this horse instantly with a blow from its beak. But then the mammals came to their senses, and predators also appeared among them.

- Is it established by the scratches on the bones that the horses were carried away or is this an assumption?

This is an assumption. When a paleontologist reconstructs the fauna, he looks at who was the herbivore, who was the predator, and identifies the most terrible predator, the top predator. Superpredators usually eat everyone. Let's take a white shark - what it sees is what it will eat. In the taiga, the top predator of spring is bears. A hungry large male will devour another smaller male, both a man and a wild boar.

- Can you then explain why dinosaurs became so smaller?

It is partly a myth that all dinosaurs were large. Dinosaurs occupied different niches. And there were a lot of small dinosaurs. When you're small, you can run and chase insects. This is your niche, you are an insect hunter. The bigger you are, the more vulnerable you are. An absolutely brilliant step - to master flight. When dinosaurs learned to fly, they had a chance to survive - you can fly if the conditions are unfavorable.

- What other evolutionary gadgets helped ancient animals occupy new niches?

Preservation of childish, larval traits into adulthood. This is called paedomorphosis. The second option, when the larva begins to reproduce, is neoteny. This is an absolutely brilliant thing, it is typical for tailed amphibians. There is also such a thing as facultative neoteny. For example, an Ambystoma larva (), very beautiful, with external gills, in a pond South America faces a life dilemma: to go on land or not. If there is a lot of food - a lot and good - why go through metamorphosis? And it remains a larva and begins to reproduce. The second way is that the reservoir dries up, there is little food, which means you go through metamorphosis and become a terrestrial salamander.

Inhibition of some development program, acquisition and consolidation of childhood traits is generally a very common evolutionary background. For example, you and I have a lot of paedomorphic traits. Even if we go to the mirror, we look at ourselves - typical childish features: large eyes, elongated muzzle.

Absolutely right. Can be different reasons, which slow down the program. A common case is when part of the body becomes paedomorphic, and some, on the contrary, superdeveloped. For example, swarming frogs suddenly begin to develop a very powerful skull, while the rest of the body remains semi-cartilaginous. Both Mickey Mouse and female anime characters are paedomorphic. The latter have big eyes, the breasts are of a very serious size, the result is a mixture: hyperdeveloped breasts with a completely childish head.

There are a lot of such mixes. It is even believed that humans, dinosaurs, and vertebrates in general arose through paedomorphosis. Our phylum is chordates. Our relatives are tunicates. Tunicates have a larva with a tail and a sessile stage. Now let’s imagine: the sessile stage is lost, the larva begins to multiply, and thus, most likely, “proto-fish” appeared. But then the “protofish” developed jaws, and they became fish, fish came to land, amphibians gave rise to reptiles that broke away from the water, and then it came to dinosaurs and humans.

I heard a crazy theory that aliens are people from the future, modified. They have huge eyes to get more visual information, a small mouth, since conversation will no longer play an important role, just a couple of fingers, since in the world of computers this is not particularly necessary, etc. Do you think it is possible to change into this?

Is it possible. There was a wonderful paleontologist - Alexey Petrovich Bystrov, he participated in the formation of the St. Petersburg school of paleontologists, and in the 60s he wrote the book “The Past, Present, Future of Man.” Alexey Petrovich was one of the first to imagine what people of the future would look like. But his fantasies had a serious scientific basis. He was not only a paleontologist, but also a military doctor. And during the war, several thousand human skulls passed through his hands. He tried to find out what no longer works for a person, what is a rudiment.

According to Bystrov, in a few thousand years a person will be of short stature, with a small number of teeth - wisdom teeth will disappear first - with a large head, since a lot of information will have to be processed.

Perhaps there will be fewer fingers and the eyes will become larger. Why waste the body's energy on developing the senses if you can perceive all the information visually and feel good?

- Can’t we learn to regenerate? After all, amphibians regenerated their paws, parts of the brain, and eyes.

This is already from the realm of fantasy. Salamanders and some other amphibians could indeed regenerate. But as soon as they moved to land, they complicated their body structure and lost the ability to regenerate. This is some kind of evolutionary fee. The dinosaurs began to bite off pieces of each other, and nothing grew back.

Some scientists are trying to revive mammoths, trying to do this with the help of mice. Is it possible to use some remains to revive dinosaurs, for example with the help of chickens?

If you had asked this five years ago, I would have said that this is absolutely impossible. Now I say that this is 98–99% impossible. Why? First, to reconstruct something, you need DNA. Frozen mammoths retain only fragments of DNA. Even this technically has not yet been decided. When the mammoth is restored with the help of mice or elephants, let molecular biologists think that it will be a breakthrough. Although I don't understand why. Well, it must be cool to have a pet hairy mammoth in your backyard.

About dinosaurs.

Previously, it was believed that nothing organic or complex molecular remained from dinosaurs. Then they did a brilliant study: they dissolved the bone of a tyrannosaurus, and it turned out that something was preserved there. But this is not DNA, these are collagen proteins, these are structural molecules that are in bones.

But this is already great progress. Since something molecular is conserved, maybe we will find something else under certain conditions. There is a minimal probability.

Now the latest technology in paleontology is the use of a synchrotron. It can be used to study the detailed structure of bones. At one of the conferences, we were given special glasses and told: “Now we will fly through the cavities inside this bone.” And so we flew. This is a completely different level.

- Would you like to pet dinosaur?

No, I wouldn't want a pet dinosaur. I would be more interested to see how it really was. This is not a pile of stones for us; in fact, these are living creatures. We can speculate about how they evolved, speculate that this dinosaur hunted in a pack, but this is all speculation. So we assumed that our Tengrisaurus was 10–12 meters. I would like to know - is this true? And see some details that we cannot even imagine.

For a whole century, Russian dinosaurs played hide and seek with scientists. Who won this exciting game?

“Russian dinosaurs, like the snakes of Ireland, are remarkable only because they are not there,” said American paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh. 120 years ago he came to Russian Empire and was surprised to learn that not a single dinosaur bone had been found in our country. That was incredible. Is it really in the big country there were no Mesozoic giants in the world?

Russian scientists have had no luck with dinosaurs. These animals reigned on the planet in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, when half of the current territory of Russia was covered by shallow seas. Herds of lizards roamed inland. But their bones were not preserved - they ended up in the area of ​​sedimentation, from where sand and clay were dragged into the seas to the burial sites. The bones arrived there ground into dust.

Occasionally, conditions on land developed that were suitable for preserving remains: the dinosaur drowned in a swamp or lake, or suffocated in layers of volcanic ash. But such burials were thoroughly destroyed over the past millions of years - glaciers passed through Russia, cutting away bedrock, and then melted glacial waters began to erode and break the fossilized bones.

Compared to the dinosaur cemeteries of Asia and America, where thousands of bones were dug up, this looked downright meager: in Russia, only one single bone turned out to be dinosaur.

Occasionally, fossil remains are found in quarries, mines, and along the banks of rivers and streams. Great luck, if they are noticed in time and transferred to scientists. But it was luck that was missing for a long time. IN late XIX centuries, fragments of bones that could pass for dinosaurs were occasionally brought to Russian museums. Strange ribs were found in the gravel used to pave the Kursk road. A piece of bone was delivered from Volyn-Podolia. An unusual vertebra was unearthed in the Southern Urals. What was accidentally obtained was described as the remains of dinosaurs, but later it turned out that these were the bones of crocodiles, marine reptiles, and even amphibians.

However, even such finds were few - all of them would have fit in a small basket. Compared to the dinosaur cemeteries of Asia and America, where thousands of bones were dug up, this looked downright meager: in Russia, only one single bone turned out to be dinosaur. A small fragment of a lizard’s foot was dug up in the Chita region near a coal mine. Paleontologist Anatoly Ryabinin described it in 1915 under the name Allosaurus sibiricus, although from one bone it was impossible to determine which dinosaur it belonged to. It is clear that it is predatory - and that’s all.

Soon more valuable remains were found. True, two funny things happened with them at once. One day, an Amur Cossack lieutenant colonel noticed that fishermen were tying strange weights on their nets - long stones with a hole in the middle. The fishermen said that they collect them on the banks of the Amur River, where a high cliff is eroded. According to them, it turned out that the entire beach there was covered with stone knuckles.

This was reported to the Academy of Sciences. An expedition was organized, which, right before the revolution, delivered more than a ton of fossilized remains to St. Petersburg. They assembled a large skeleton from them, describing it as the new kind duck-billed dinosaur. The lizard was given the name “Amur Manchurosaurus” (Mandschurosaurus amurensis). True, evil tongues called him a gypsosaur, because he was missing many bones - they were molded from plaster. The skull is the most an important part the skeleton was also made of plaster, only a piece of the braincase was real. Later it became clear that the original bones belonged to different species and genera of lizards.

Now almost none of the paleontologists recognize Manchurosaurs. The irony also lies in the fact that the bones were collected on the right, Chinese bank of the Amur. So “gypsosaurus” should not be considered Russian, but rather Chinese.

The curiosity came out with a second skeleton. The lizard was dug up in the coal mines of Sakhalin by Japanese paleontologists and named the Sakhalin Nipponosaurus (Nipponosaurus sachalinensis). This was in the 1930s, when, after Russia’s defeat in Russian-Japanese war, Japan owned the island. Fifteen years later, Sakhalin again became Russian, but the dinosaur remained “Japanese”. And no more dinosaur remains were found here.

The search for dinosaurs in Russia and the Soviet Union remained unsuccessful for a long time. It was getting ridiculous. In the late 1920s, to the southern outskirts Soviet Union, a paleontological expedition headed to the Kazakh steppes. “The whole day the horse walked over countless dinosaur bones,” recalled its participant, paleontologist and science fiction writer Ivan Efremov. The bones covered vast areas of tens of kilometers. But not a single skeleton or skull was found - only fragments of bones.

“They didn’t know how to study them back then, no one collected them,” says paleontologist Alexander Averyanov. Only half a century later, experts learned to identify extinct animals from fragmentary remains. But then the huge dinosaur cemetery in Kazakhstan had already been lost.

Then, for several years, Soviet paleontologists worked in the Kazakh Kara-Tau mountains, where layers of gray shale lie. These mountains contain a great variety of prints of fish, plants and insects from the Jurassic period. Unique skeletons of ancient salamanders, turtles, complete prints of pterosaurs, and a bird feather were discovered here. The remains of almost all the inhabitants of the Jurassic lake and those who inhabited its shores were found. And again - no dinosaurs, although the Jurassic period was their heyday...

In the first half of the last century, numerous burial sites of Permian lizards, Devonian fish, and Triassic amphibians were discovered in Russia. Paleontological laboratories had everything from fossil insects to mammoth carcasses. Everything except the notorious lizards - that’s what Ivan Efremov called dinosaurs in the Russian manner.

It wasn't until 1953 that paleontologists really got lucky. On the high bank of the Kemerovo Kiya River near the village of Shestakovo, geologists came across the skull and incomplete skeleton of a small, dog-sized psittacosaurus, which was named Siberian (Psittacosaurus sibiricus).

The skeleton was delivered to Moscow. A paleontological expedition was immediately sent to Kuzbass, but luck turned against the scientists again. They did not find any remains - the water was high that summer, the layer with bones was flooded.

Three years later, at the request of Efremov, an expedition of Kemerovo schoolchildren, led by Gennady Prashkevich, went to Shestakovo, in the future famous writer, poet, translator. The guys then collected a whole box of bones, but, as it turned out in Moscow, they all belonged to mammoths and bison. Only half a century later, several more dinosaur bones were found in Shestakovo, including huge, bucket-like sauropod vertebrae.

Things were no less complicated with the location of dinosaurs in the Far East. In the 1950s, an expedition from the Paleontological Institute tried to find dinosaurs in Blagoveshchensk. Excavations brought nothing but a handful of scattered bones. It was decided that the bones were redeposited here: once whole skeletons were broken by water, after which the fragments were carried away to another place. They put an end to the location. As it turned out later, it was in vain.

The lizards found in the Far East turned out to be very interesting - they were one of the last dinosaurs to live on the planet.

Nowadays, excavations are carried out annually in the Far East, mainly in Blagoveshchensk. The local lizards turned out to be very interesting - they were one of the last dinosaurs to live on the planet. They lived literally at the end of the great extinction. The study of Russian dinosaurs in general has advanced greatly in the last twenty years. A dozen large sites were found, and valuable remains were found in previously known discovery sites. The main burial places of Russian dinosaurs are located beyond the Urals - in Kundur, Blagoveshchensk, Shestakovo.

A unique place was discovered on the banks of the Kakanaut River on the Koryak Highlands - this is the northernmost point of discovery of dinosaurs on the planet. Bones from seven families and egg shells from at least two species of dinosaurs have been found here. Remains of Cretaceous lizards were also found in Buryatia (locations Murtoy and Krasny Yar) and Krasnoyarsk Territory (Bolshoy Kemchug). Dinosaurs of the Jurassic period were found in Yakutia (Teete) and in the Republic of Tyva (Kalbak-Kyry).

A small burial of Jurassic reptiles was also discovered near the city of Sharypovo in the Krasnoyarsk Territory. Local historian Sergei Krasnolutsky came up with an idea: since dinosaurs were found in the neighboring Kemerovo region, then they can be found here in the Krasnoyarsk Territory. In search of bones, he went to a coal mine.

For a long time nothing came across, but finally the local historian saw the broken shells of turtles. There were so many of them that this layer was later called turtle soup. And nearby were bone plaques and teeth of crocodiles, long curved claws of dinosaurs that lived in the mid-Jurassic period.

This time is practically a “blank spot” in the evolution of terrestrial life. Very few traces of him remain. It is not surprising that excavations in Sharypovo, which have been ongoing for several years, have led to the discovery of new animals. Among them are an as yet undescribed stegosaurus and the predatory dinosaur Kileskus (Kileskus aristotocus), a distant ancestor of the famous tyrannosaurs.

In the western part of Russia there are no burials with intact skeletons and skulls of dinosaurs. Here, primarily in the Volga region and the Belgorod region, one comes across mostly scattered remains - individual vertebrae, teeth or bone fragments.

An interesting discovery was made a hundred kilometers from Moscow, near the Peski railway station, in a quarry where white limestone is mined. In these quarries there are karst sinkholes from the Jurassic period. In the early 1990s, bulldozers opened up a whole chain of ancient caves. 175 million years ago an underground river flowed through them, originating in the lake. The river carried the remains of animals, tree branches, and plant spores underground. Over the course of several years, paleontologists managed to collect numerous turtle shells, bones of amphibians, crocodiles and ancient mammals, fish skeletons, freshwater shark spines and the remains of predatory coelurosaurs (Coelurosauria). These dinosaurs were probably about three meters long, although the bones found were small: teeth the size of a fingernail and a claw smaller than a matchstick.

Gradually, the picture of the life of Russian lizards is becoming more and more complete. Surely new burials will be discovered. And those that have been known for a long time constantly bring surprises in the form of bones of previously unknown dinosaurs. Othniel Charles Marsh, who insisted that there were no Russian dinosaurs, concluded his statement by saying that sooner or later the remains of these animals would be found in Russia. The American paleontologist turned out to be right, although he had to wait a long time.

It is no secret that during the existence of our planet, the world of flora and fauna has changed several times. Dinosaurs did not survive to our times, but their existence is confirmed by numerous excavations.

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Types of dinosaurs, their classification

Paleontologists say that dinosaurs inhabited our planet for more than a hundred million years. Scientists came to such conclusions after many years of excavations, which allowed them to invade the bowels of the earth and find there numerous remains of giant birds and animals. One can only guess what reality was like in those days.

Today we will take a closer look at what types of dinosaurs there are, and what information about them is available today. In general, when you start to become interested in these animals, you are amazed at how much paleontologists know, but no one has ever seen these animals with their own eyes. Now these are the heroes of horror films, fairy tales for children, and so on, it is thanks to the artists that we have a clear idea of ​​what such unusual creatures really looked like. Very often, different dinosaurs are compared to dragons.

Scientists, unfortunately, have not been able to come to a common conclusion as to why dinosaurs suddenly became extinct on our planet. Although in that era not only dinosaurs disappeared, but also many inhabitants of the underwater world. One theory says that the Earth has changed dramatically climatic conditions, and dinosaurs could not live in new environment, so one after another they began to die. The second theory (more realistic) says that 65 million years ago a huge asteroid crashed onto our planet, destroying many earthly creatures.

We will not go into detail about why huge creatures disappeared from the face of the Earth; it will be much more interesting to talk about what paleontologists know today. And they know a lot; from the remains they were able to establish what kind of dinosaurs existed, tell approximately how many species there were, and also give them specific names.

For the first time, the English biologist Richard Owen spoke about dinosaurs; it was he who called the animals with this term (by the way, “dinosaur” is translated from Greek as a terrible lizard). Until 1843, scientists did not put forward theories about the existence of dinosaurs. Their remains were attributed to either dragons or other giant mythical animals.

Now the list of species is simply huge and each genus has its own name. For example, you will be interested to know what the two largest and most ancient groups of these animals are. Maybe the names will seem funny to some, but these are lizard-hipped and ornithischian creatures. Next we list the most famous and, in our opinion, the main species or types of dinosaurs. Don’t be surprised that representatives of the most famous breeds could swim and fly beautifully, and not just move on land. A lot of information was studied by scientists before they were able to draw conclusions that dinosaurs can be divided into the following groups:

• predatory;
• herbivores;
• flying;
• aquatic.

Paleontologists knew exactly how to distinguish one type from another, they carried out more and more research, as a result of which the world learned about trinosaurs, ichthoisaurs, pliosaurs, tyrannosaurs, ornithocheiruses, and so on.

The exact number of species of dinosaurs that existed cannot be established, and it is unlikely that this will ever be known. There are so many nuances to studying fossils. The number of varieties is said to range from 250 to 550 and these numbers are constantly changing. For example, some species were identified only by excavating a single tooth or vertebra. Over time, scientists realize that some species that were previously considered different can actually be classified as the same thing. So no one dares to draw precise conclusions. Perhaps most types of dinosaurs exist only in the imagination of paleontologists and other sensation-seekers. But since these huge creatures have disappeared from our planet, it means that it had to be so. Nothing happens by chance, especially the extinction of real giant predators.

Swimming dinosaur: myth or reality?

Paleontologists claim that aquatic dinosaurs did exist. To be honest, the population of the seas and oceans in those days was not so harmless. Waterfowl dinosaur fish would happily eat everyone. And they cannot even compare with the most dangerous sharks today. The size of the monsters exceeded the size of modern whales. Huge animals could happily have a snack, for example, on another dinosaur, which, by chance, was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some fish grew up to 25 m (for comparison, a standard nine-story building is 30 m).

Sea monsters were classified as follows:

• plesiosaur (a long-necked creature that lived underwater all the time, sometimes surfacing to breathe air or grab a flying bird);
• Elasmosaurus weighed about 500 kg, had a small but movable head on a huge (8 m) neck;
• mosasaurs lived in the seas and oceans, but moved a little like a snake;
• Ichthyosaurs are very warlike and bloodthirsty animals that lived and hunted in packs. There were practically no insurmountable obstacles for them;
• nothosaurus led a dual lifestyle (on land and in water), feeding on small creatures and fish;
• Liopleurodons lived exclusively in aquatic environment, could hold their breath for several hours, dive to the depths and hunt there;
• Shonisaurus is a completely harmless reptile that was an excellent hunter and ate mollusks, octopuses, and squid.

Very little is known about the existence of two-headed creatures; many types of dinosaurs had long claws that helped them move faster. Some types of large sea inhabitants were:

• with a collar around the neck;
• with hood;
• with a ridge on the back (sometimes with two ridges);
• with spikes;
• with a tuft on the head;
• with a mace on the tail.

Herbivorous dinosaurs: their classification

This is most likely the most peaceful species of huge creatures. They calmly chewed grass, were happy and entered into battle solely for the purpose of self-defense. Rarely did herbivores attack first. Moreover, dinosaurs of this type were not at all weak, defenseless animals. A powerful skeleton, huge horns, a tail with a club, unrealistically huge sizes, strong limbs that could immediately strike on the spot - all these are characteristics of completely peaceful animals.

There were several types of herbivorous creatures:

• stegosaurs - they had peculiar crests on their bodies, chewed grass, and swallowed stones from time to time to improve digestion;
• euoplocephalus, which was covered with spines, a bony shell and had a club tail. This is a truly scary monster;
• brachiosaurus - could eat about a ton of greenery in just a day;
• Triceratops had beaks and horns, lived in herds, and easily defended themselves from enemies;
• hadrosaurs were quite large, but very vulnerable, it is still a mystery how they survived.

This is not a complete list of species of grass dinosaurs.

Predatory dinosaurs

Still, most dinosaurs were predators by nature. They had a powerful body structure, huge teeth, horns, and shells. All this allowed the animals to rise above other living beings; dinosaurs often fought with their relatives. The strongest always won, there was no talk of any family ties. Tyrannosaurus rex was considered the most popular predator; you can find a lot about it interesting information, watch the video. T-Rex is the hero of many horror films, because this born hunter was truly scary, disgusting, ruthless, and bloodthirsty.

Long-necked dinosaur (name and species)

Among herbivores, marine and predatory species There were breeds that were distinguished by unrealistically long necks. For example, diplodocus is a herbivore whose neck consisted of 15 vertebrae. He could easily reach branches from the tallest trees.

Flying species or dinosaur birds actually had wings, scales, and sometimes even feathers. The peculiarity of these creatures were huge, very sharp teeth, which cannot be said about modern birds. These are pterodactyls, pterosaurs, archeopteryx. Ornithocheirus was the size of a small airplane, had a light skeleton, and a crest on its beak. Such “birds” lived not far from large bodies of water.

Quite educational and also interesting to read about the inhabitants of the Jurassic period, isn’t it? At that time, the population of the Earth was completely different, scary and incomprehensible to us, its modern inhabitants.

Any person imagines a dinosaur in the form of a ferocious lizard of terrifying size, grinning a huge mouth and destroying everything in its path. Indeed, most ancient reptiles had gigantic sizes that boggle the imagination. This is evidenced by numerous finds of individual fragments and even entire skeletons of fossil lizards. However, not all dinosaurs were giants; among them there were individual species, which nature, as if in mockery, endowed with the growth of a chicken. These tiny creatures darted in numerous flocks among the thickets of relict ferns, trying not to get under the feet of their huge relatives and looking for even smaller prey.

Why did scientists know so little about these amazing little creatures until recently? It was their short stature that played a cruel joke on them. The bones of these dinosaurs were so light and fragile that they did not stand the test of time and have practically not survived to the present day. Only isolated finds allowed these small reptiles to make themselves known.

This lizard has gained fame small predator Jurassic period. Its length did not exceed a meter, and its weight reached only two kilograms. It walked on fast hind legs, had a long tail and a movable head. The nimble dinosaur hunted insects and lizards. A total of three Compsognathus skeletons were found. Two of them were discovered in Europe in the mid-nineteenth and late twentieth centuries, and one skeleton was preserved in Russia and was found as recently as 2010. Thanks to these finds, scientists were able to restore the appearance and habits of the fossil dinosaur.

Nquebasaurus
The only fragment of the skeleton of this lizard was found in 2000 in Africa, near the Sahara Desert. Most likely the remains belonged to a cub. The structural features of these lizards include the presence of long fingers, which made it possible to capture prey. The so-called stomach stones, which are usually intended for grinding plant foods, are preserved in the intestines. This allowed scientists to conclude that Nkwebasaurs were omnivorous. The dinosaur did not exceed a meter in length and was a contemporary of Compsognathus.

Scipionyx
The perfectly preserved skeleton of this lizard was found in Italy at the end of the twentieth century. The skeleton, which belonged to a baby dinosaur, pleased scientists with an extensive base for research, because the fossilized remains preserved the structure of not only the soft tissues of the animal, but also its internal organs. Most likely, the lizard's body was covered with primitive feathers. It walked on its hind legs, supporting its body with its tail. The size of adult individuals, according to scientists, reached two meters. The dinosaur lived in the Cretaceous period and was a predator. In any case, among the undigested food remains, scientists found lizards and fish.