Brief Description |
Fossil bones from the flipper of a pliosaur: a femur, fibula, tibia, and six other smaller bones. The bones are rough, cracked and pitted with infilled areas in the femur and tibia.
The bones were found in rock in the Mangahouanga Stream, Hawkes Bay, North Island, New Zealand, in the mid 1980s.
Pliosauroids, also commonly known as pliosaurs, are known from the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods. The pliosauroids were short-necked plesiosaurs with large heads and massive toothed jaws. These swimming reptiles were not dinosaurs, but distant cousins of modern lizards.
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