Quick stats:
- When: Campanian stage of the Late Cretaceous
- Where: North America
- What: Long-necked plesiosaur from the Late Cretaceous
- Size: 10.3 (34ft)
- Meaning of name: Flat-Tailed Thin-Plate Lizard
- Diet: Piscivore
“File:Elasmosaurus skeletal.png” by Wedel & Taylor is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
Elasmosaurus had the longest neck of any plesiosaur (a type of marine reptile). As you can see from the pictures above, the Elasmosaurus certainly did have a very long neck in proportion to the rest of the body, not to mention the overall size of Elasmosaurus, 10.3m! This giant lived during the Late Cretaceous, about 70.6 million years ago to 93.9 million years ago. I will write another blog post about why prehistoric animals were generally so large. The meaning of its name: the flat-tailed part refers to the vertebrae in its neck, and the thin-plate part describes bones further down in the body, such as the sternal area. Elasmosaurus would have eaten small marine animals such as fish.
Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals 