Aristonectes

Aristonectes
Temporal range: Late Cretaceous
Aristonectes parvidens
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Sauropsida
Superorder: Sauropterygia
Order: Plesiosauria
Family: Elasmosauridae[1]
Subfamily: Aristonectinae
Genus: Aristonectes
Species
  • Aristonectes parvidens (type) Cabrera, 1941
  • Aristonectes quiriquinensis Otero et al., 2014

Aristonectes (meaning 'best swimmer') is an extinct genus of plesiosaur from the Late Cretaceous of what is now South America and Antarctica. The type species is Aristonectes parvidens, first named by Cabrera in 1941.

Aristonectes has been classified variously since the 1941 description, but a 2003 review of plesiosaurs conducted by Gasparini et al. found that Aristonectes was most closely related to elasmosaurid plesiosaurs like Elasmosaurus. A similar plesiosaur, Morturneria, may be a junior synonym of Aristonectes, the study found.

Aristonectes has been recently placed within its own family, along with Tatenectes, Kaiwhekea, and Kimmerosaurus, by O'Keefe and Street (2009), as sister family of the polycotylid cryptoclidoids, but an even more recent study (Otero et al., 2014) has shown Aristonectes to be a derived Elasmosaurid, thus making Aristonectidae synonymous with Elasmosauridae.



See also

References

  1. ↑ Otero et al. (2014), Aristonectes quiriquinensis, sp. nov., a new highly derived elasmosaurid from the upper Maastrichtian of central Chile

External links

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