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Scientists have named an ancient species of giant sea lizard with " angry eyebrows " and a dumpy tail after Jörmungandr , a ocean serpent from Norse mythology .
The dire creature , Jǫrmungandrwalhallaensis , be 80 million years ago in an ancient sea in what is now North Dakota .
An artist’s rendition of the newly described mosasaur, namedJǫrmungandr walhallaensisafter a mythical Norse sea serpent.
" If you put flippers on a Komodo flying dragon and made it really big , that ’s what it would have looked like , " lead authorAmelia Zietlow , a postdoctoral student in comparative biology at the American Museum of Natural History ’s Richard Gilder Graduate School , order in a statement .
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Zietlow and colleagues discovered the almost - everlasting skull , jaw , cervical spine and several vertebrae of the 24 - foot - foresightful ( 7 metre ) mosasaur in 2015 in Walhalla , North Dakota . The squad draw the sea monster in a newspaper publisher write Monday ( Oct. 30 ) in the journalBulletin of the American Museum of Natural History .
Their psychoanalysis showed thatJ.walhallaensiscontained many of the same feature as two knownmosasaurs : the smallerClidastesand the much largerMosasaurus , which it predates . Like its giant cousin , J. walhallaensislived during theCretaceous period(roughly 145 million to 66 million years ago ) alongside dinosaurs and had massive flippers and a " shark - like hind end " that helped it glide through the water . It also had a bony ridgepole on its skull that resembled " angry brow , " according to the financial statement .
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palaeontologist still do n’t concord on whether mosasaurs are more close related tolizardsor to snakes . However , this freshly described metal money offers researchers more insight into these elusive sea creature .
" As these beast evolve into these elephantine ocean monster , they were constantly have changes , " Zietlow sound out . " This employment bugger off us one step nigher to understanding how all these different grade are tie in to one another . "
