Strange 94 million year old sea monster 'emerges' in the middle of national park

A research team from the US, the Netherlands and France discovered a new species thanks to the effort to reconstruct the skull from fossil fragments discovered since February 2012 in the Tropic Shale area of Glen Canyon, a national park with majestic canyons and strange landscapes in the state of Utah - USA.

A previously unknown sea monster, a 3m long version of the terrifying and giant Cretaceous mosasaurs, has appeared unexpectedly in the "alien" landscape of Glen Canyon.

Graphic depicts a new sea monster that has just appeared in Utah.

The new creature - which lived nearly 94 million years ago - has been named Sarabosaurus dahli , part of a group of large marine reptiles known as "mosasaurs" and is detailed in a paper published in the scientific journal Cretaceous Research.

According to paleontologist Michael Polcyn from Utrecht University (Netherlands) , Sarabosaurus dahli is the oldest mosasaur in the area - which was a vast ocean during the Cretaceous period, before the terrain changed dramatically due to tectonic activity.

The mosasaurs that roamed Earth's waters during the later Cretaceous period (about 90 to 66 million years ago) were often larger than the older group of oceanic monsters known as the ichthyosaurs. They were like underwater versions of the dinosaurs.

Mosasaurs were apex predators in the Cretaceous oceans, with the largest species reaching lengths of up to 17m.

The newly discovered Sarabosaurus dahli is one of the "smallest" mosasaurs, measuring about 3 meters in length.

It is a marine reptile that retains a primitive state of basic vascular pattern, which may provide many details showing the complex and spectacular evolution of giant Cretaceous reptiles, before the mass extinction 66 million years ago caused by the Chicxulub asteroid impact with Earth.

This new species, as well as all other mosasaurs, aquatic ichthyosaurs, land dinosaurs and sky pterosaurs, all disappeared from the planet in this space collision.