Lot - 37 Fossil Mosasaur Teeth With Composite Roots

Typically we just sell retail but over the next week or so we will be making available a number of wholesale lots of inexpensive material for purchase.

This is a lot of 37, authentic Mosasaur teeth from the phosphate deposits in the Oulad Abdoun Basin of Morocco. Most of the of the roots on these teeth are either composites, and a few of the the teeth have their original roots.

The vast majority of teeth are found without roots still attached. Both the crowns of the teeth and the roots are real fossils, they've just been put back together together. The largest tooth in this lot measures 3.9" long and the smallest is ". Some of the teeth have some repair work or a little bit of restoration to the roots.

All of the teeth are from the Mosasaur, Igdamanosaurus (Globidens) which had mushroom shaped teeth for crushing shells.

At the price of $300 this works out to just over $8 per tooth. For comparison, similar sized composite teeth typically retail $20-40 online, and we typically sell similarly sized teeth that were NOT composites for $40-100 each.

Mosasaurs were a family of enormous marine reptiles that truly dominated the seas 90 million years ago, ruling during the last 20-25 million years of the Cretaceous period. With the extinction of the ichthyosaurs and decline of plesiosaurs, mosasaurs diversified to become prolific apex predators in nearly every habitat of the oceanic world.

Artist's reconstruction of the mosasaur Prognathodon saturator.
Artist's reconstruction of the mosasaur Prognathodon saturator.


Larger mosasaurs were the great leviathans of their time, extending 10–15 meters, or 33–49 feet long. Hainosaurus holds the record for the longest mosasaur at a seemingly impossible 57 feet. The smaller genera were still an impressive 10–20 feet long.

Mosasaurs probably evolved from semi-aquatic scaled reptiles, perhaps more similar in appearance to modern-day monitor lizards. They had double-hinged jaws and flexible skulls much like that of a snake which enabled them to gulp down their prey almost whole.

The gruesome unchewed contents of fossilized mosasaur guts have revealed a varied diet of sea birds, ammonites, smaller marine lizards, possibly sharks, and even other mosasaurs. Ammonites were especially crunchy mosasaur treats. They were abundant in the Cretaceous seas, and some mosasaurs had specialized teeth for the job.



Mosasaurs probably lurked for an ambush, rather than hunt, using their powerful tail flukes for extra thrust to dart out and swallow unsuspecting prey. Non-reflective, keeled scales may have been a great advantage to the mosasaur sneak-attack.

Mosasaurs breathed air and gave birth to live young. The bronchi leading to the lungs run parallel to each other, instead of splitting apart from one another as in monitors and other terrestrial reptiles. They were well-adapted to living in the warm, shallow, epicontinental seas of the period.

Although mosasaurs diversified and proliferated at a spectacular rate, their specialization is considered the source of their demise when marine systems collapsed at the end of the Cretaceous.
SOLD
DETAILS
SPECIES
Igdamanosaurus (Globidens)
LOCATION
Oulad Abdoun Basin, Morocco
FORMATION
Phosphate Deposits
SIZE
Largest 3.9", Smallest 2"
CATEGORY
ITEM
#39216
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