Mosasaurus || Lizard of the Meuse River

Mosasaurus ("lizard of the Meuse River") is the type genus of the mosasaurs, an extinct group of aquatic squamate reptiles. The genus lived from about 82 to 66 million years ago during the Campanian and Maastrichtian stages of the Late Cretaceous. The earliest fossils known to science were found as skulls in a chalk quarry near the Dutch city of Maastricht in the late 1700s, which were initially thought to have been the bones of crocodiles or whales. One particular skull discovered at around 1780, and which was seized during the French Revolutionary Wars for its scientific value and transported to Paris, was famously nicknamed the "great animal of Maastricht". In 1808, naturalist Georges Cuvier concluded that it belonged to a giant marine lizard with similarities to monitor lizards but otherwise unlike any animal known today. This concept was revolutionary at the time and helped support the then-developing ideas of extinction.