Unranked clade
Valid Extinct

Xenopsaria

Benson and Druckenmiller 2014

Plesiosauroidea is an extinct clade of carnivorous marine reptiles. They have the snake-like longest neck to body ratio of any reptile. Plesiosauroids are known from the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. After their discovery, some plesiosauroids were said to have resembled "a snake threaded through the shell of a turtle", although they had no shell.

Temporal range
Triassic
Jurassic
Cretaceous
Paleogene
Neogene
252 201 145 66 0 Ma
PBDB occurrences
1
Group
Sauroptérygiens
Carnivore aquatic, depth=surface Marine
Xenopsaria
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Dolichorhynchops osborni, National Museum of Natural History, Washington D. C. © Ryan Somma · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia
PBDB ↗ Wikipedia ↗
Classification
Sauropterygia Suborder
›
Plesiosauria Order
›
Xenopsaria Unranked clade
Fossil sites 1 geolocated sites
Distribution
Top countries
🇯🇵 Japan
1
Temporal distribution
Campanian (83.6–72.2 Ma)
1
Images 1
Bibliography
Original description
R. B. J. Benson and P. S. Druckenmiller. 2014. Faunal turnover of marine tetrapods during the Jurassic–Cretaceous transition. Biological Reviews 89(1):1-23 DOI ↗
Bibliography (1)
D. Nakatani and H. Nakaya. 2023. A plesiosaur (Reptilia: Sauropterygia) from the Upper Cretaceous (Campanian) Izumi Group of Higashi Kagawa City, Kagawa Prefecture, South Western Japan. Fossils 113:5-16 DOI ↗