Discovery! Cretaceous sea monster named after world-ending Norse serpent

If you are fascinated by dinosaurs and prehistoric sea life as I am, today's blog will be for you. There's been a new discovery in North Dakota of a giant sea creature from the Cretaceous period. The Cretaceous is a geological period that began 145 million years ago and ended 66 million years ago. It is the last period in the Mesozoic Era. It comes after the Jurassic Period and before the Paleogene - the first period of the Cenozoic Era, our current era. Here's the story of this amazing find.

 

(Image: An artist's rendition of the newly described mosasaur, named Jǫrmungandr walhallaensis after a mythical Norse sea serpent, attacking another. (Image credit: AMNH))

Newly discovered Cretaceous sea monster named after world-ending Norse serpent 

By Jennifer Nalewicki Live Science, Nov 1,2023

Paleontologists have described a new species of mosasaur with "angry eyebrows" that lived 80 million years ago.

Scientists have named an ancient species of giant sea lizard with "angry eyebrows" and a stumpy tail after Jörmungandr, a sea serpent from Norse mythology.

The fearsome creature, Jǫrmungandr walhallaensis, lived 80 million years ago in an ancient sea in what is now North Dakota.

"If you put flippers on a Komodo dragon and made it really big, that's what it would have looked like," lead author Amelia Zietlow, a postdoctoral student in comparative biology at the American Museum of Natural History's Richard Gilder Graduate School, said in a statement.

Zietlow and colleagues discovered the almost-complete skull, jaws, cervical spine and several vertebrae of the 24-foot-long (7 meters) mosasaur in 2015 in Walhalla, North Dakota. The team described the sea monster in a paper published Monday (Oct. 30) in the journal Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History.

(Credit: Árni Magnússon Institute in Iceland.)

ABOUT Jörmungandr 

Jörmungandr is the Midgard (Earth) Serpent (also World Serpent) in Norse mythology who encircles the realm of Midgard. He is the son of the god Loki and the giantess Angrboða and brother of the great wolf Fenrir and Hel, Queen of the Dead