, from the late Cretaceous period, showcasing the diversity of marine ecosystems before the dinosaur extinction. This species, part of the mosasaur family, highlights a time when the oceans teemed with a variety of giant predators, unlike today’s ecosystems dominated by a few apex predators. Credit: Andrey Atuchinof marine lizard with dagger-like teeth that lived near the end of the age of dinosaurs.
“There seems to have been a huge change in the ecosystem structure in the past 66 million years,” said Longrich. “This incredible diversity of top predators in the Late Cretaceous is unusual, and we don’t see that in modern marine communities.” “Modern ecosystems have predators like baleen whales and dolphins that eat small prey, and not many things eating large prey. The Cretaceous has a huge number of marine reptile species that take large prey. Whether there’s something about marine reptiles that caused the ecosystem to be different, or the prey, or perhaps the environment, we don’t know. But this was an incredibly dangerous time to be a fish, a sea turtle, or even a marine reptile.
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