''Hescheleria'' is an extinct

genus Genus ( plural genera ) is a taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms as well as viruses. In the hierarchy of biological classification, genus comes above species and below family. In binomial nom ...

thalattosauria Thalattosauria (Greek for "sea lizards") is an extinct order of prehistoric marine reptiles that lived in the middle to late Triassic period. Thalattosaurs were diverse in size and shape, and are divided into two superfamilies: Askeptosauroidea ...

n marine reptile from the Middle

Triassic The Triassic ( ) is a geologic period and system (stratigraphy), system which spans 50.6 million years from the end of the Permian Period 251.902 million years ago (Year#Abbreviations yr and ya, Mya), to the beginning of the Jurassic Period 201.36 ...

(247.2 to 235 Ma) of

Monte San Giorgio Monte San Giorgio is a mountain and UNESCO World Heritage Site on the border between Switzerland and Italy. It is part of the Lugano Prealps, overlooking Lake Lugano in the Swiss Canton of Ticino. Monte San Giorgio is a wooded mountain, rising ...

in Switzerland. It is represented by a single type species, ''H. ruebeli'', which was named in 1936.

Description

Like other thalattosaurs, ''Hescheleria'' has a slender lizard-like body with a long paddle-shaped tail. It is estimated to have grown to approximately 1 meter in length. The skull possesses an unusually-shaped snout, with sharply downturned

premaxilla The premaxilla (or praemaxilla) is one of a pair of small cranial bones at the very tip of the upper jaw of many animals, usually, but not always, bearing teeth. In humans, they are fused with the maxilla. The "premaxilla" of therian mammal has ...

e. This forms a toothy hook at almost a right angle to the rest of the jaw, with a large

diastema A diastema (plural diastemata, from Greek διάστημα, space) is a space or gap between two teeth. Many species of mammals have diastemata as a normal feature, most commonly between the incisors and molars. More colloquially, the condition ...

. The mandible is considerably robust and is dotted with small sharp teeth, along with a pair of pointed conical projections towards the tip, the function of which is unknown. The strange skull suggests a highly specialized lifestyle. It has been speculated that the projections on the mandible were used to crush hard-shelled prey such as molluscs. Other paleontologists disagree with this hypothesis, arguing that the projections do not occlude against any other potential crushing surface in the jaws, instead making contact with the rostral diastema.

References

Thalattosaurs Prehistoric marine reptiles Prehistoric reptile genera Middle Triassic reptiles of Europe {{paleo-reptile-stub