Besano Riveria
Summary: Set in the Besano Formation in Northwestern Italy in the Middle Triassic Period, 242 Million Years Ago, a young female Nothosaurus explores the underwater coral reefs and encounters many marine creatures, but she must be careful of the large aquatic predators that patrol these waters.
Cast: Nothosaurus (focus), Tanystropheus hydroides and longobardicus, Mixosaurus, Cymbospondylus, Besanosaurus, Foreyia, Retiophyllia, Solenolmia, Worthenia (Humiliworthenia) aff. Microstriata, Silvestrosaurus, Luganoia, Meridensia, Cyamodus, Odoiporosaurus, Paraplacodus, and Ticinosuchus.
It starts in the North American Mammal Hall at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. Thomas is standing behind a diorama of Steller's Sea Lions sitting on the rocks behind a mural of the Pacific Ocean, mostly of females with a pup. Standing in the middle is a large male Sea Lion as Thomas begins to narrate. "Sea Lions are quite exquisite semi-aquatic marine mammals living along the coastal areas of the world's ocean patrolling the waters for aquatic fish to feast on like these Steller's Sea Lions only coming to the beaches to mate and raise their young. But during the age of the Dinosaurs while the dinosaurs ruled the land and pterosaurs filled the skies, in the oceans lurked true living sea monsters, the marine reptiles. Their ancestors once lived on land and returned to the ocean to become one of the greatest ocean predators from long-necked plesiosaurs, short-necked pliosaurs, dolphin-like ichthyosaurs, and lizard-like mosasaurs. But some marine reptiles at the beginning of their reign in the Triassic still have some connections to the land like this one." He brings out a model cast of a semi-aquatic marine reptile on his left hand. "Nothosaurus, meaning "False Lizard," a semi-aquatic marine reptile that probably had a lifestyle similar to that of today's seals and sea lions. It had many adaption features for life in the ocean, its tail, legs, and webbed feet help it swim to propel and steer it through the water. The skull was broad and flat, with long jaws, lined with needle teeth to help catch fish. So what was its life like living on both worlds of the land and in the water?"
. . . . .
Dawn rises over the Tethys Sea, a prehistoric ocean that covered most of the Earth during much of the Mesozoic Era and early Cenozoic Era, located between the ancient continents of Gondwana and Laurasia. This is the Besano formation, a deep and stable marine environment that would have been positioned among shallow-water reefs and carbonate platforms located in what would become the Southern Alps of northwestern Italy and southern Switzerland. In the Late Triassic, it was a coastal environment, with beaches that are either sandy, smooth rocks, or rocky shorelines full of small tide pools. This is the time when the first of the three major reptile groups appeared, in the skies flying reptiles known as pterosaurs, on the land the first dinosaurs appeared, and it's in the oceans where the reptiles left the land to return to the water to become marine predators. Some live in the oceans permanently as fully aquatic reptiles others still keep their relationship with land becoming semi-aquatic among them is the Nothosaurus.
A young juvenile female Nothosaurus wakes up after having a sleep last night, she is currently warming up under the bright rays of the sun. Like most cold-blooded reptiles, they are ectothermic and must rely on their environment to keep their bodies warm and functioning properly. The sun's rays also heat the rocks that she is resting on in turn warming her up alongside members of her colony with some resting on one another for warmth. Once fully charged, they are ready to start the day.
It is the mating season and the Nothosaurs have returned from feeding out in the sea to the coastal shorelines of dry land to breed, adult females come here to mate with the males, Nothosaurs are viviparous, they give birth to live young that developed inside the body of the womb, and once born the young are left to fend for themselves. For the male Nothosaurs is it a time to mate often with the females who had finished laying their eggs, Males establish a turf with a harem of females they often wrestle and square off with each other slamming their necks and chests, and pinning down their opponents in a showdown of strength. The young juvenile Nothosaurus is still too young to participate this year, but she has plenty of experience to observe the event soon it would be her turn to join in and give birth to her young.
The Nothosaur walks along the sandy beach as he strolls by another pod of marine reptiles also in the middle of their breeding season, Silvestrosaurus. A close relative of Nothosaurus, but smaller. Unlike Nothosaurus, Silvestrosaurus' front limbs are paddle-like and were only around 0.6–0.7 m (2.0–2.3 ft.) long as an adult, making it relatively small for a nothosaur. Although larger individuals measure 1–1.2 m (3.3–3.9 ft.) long. Then one of them spots danger and they all scatter running back into the water as the Nothosaurus runs towards the tide pools. It was a predator called Ticinosuchus. A suchian archosaur about 3 meters (10 ft.) long, and its whole body, even the belly, was covered in thick, armored scutes aligned in neat rows, with a one-to-one assignment of scutes to vertebrae. These distant relatives of crocodiles patrol the beaches looking for anything dead that washes up on the shore or prey on small marine reptiles basking in the sand, but not this time as more predator hunts fail more than they succeeded even for the smallest of predators.
The young Nothosaurus who has escaped climbs down to the tide pools on her way to the ocean, in the intertidal zone the tide pools are tiny pocket pool depressions made in the rocky coasts. Inside the tide pools are filled with undersea life, snails, barnacles, mussels, sea anemones, sea urchins, Sea stars that appeared in the Triassic, various crustaceans, algae like kelp and seaweed, and small fishes. As ocean water retreats outside the tide pool during low tide, the resident marine life must endure hours exposed to the sun, low oxygen, increasing water temperature, and predators such as wading birds that specialize in dining in these shallow pools. At high tide, the pool's plants and animals are bathed in fresh seawater but must endure the pounding of crashing waves and foraging fish with temporary access to the shoreline. To survive in this rugged environment, tide pool inhabitants often cling very tightly to any rock to which they can adhere. Barnacles produce fast-curing cement that lets them stay put. The space in a tide pool may be limited, but the food there is plentiful. Every wave at every high tide delivers fresh nutrients and microscopic organisms, such as plankton, to support and replenish the pool's intricate food chain. Washed in by the waves, these organisms nourish the smallest animals, which, in turn, sustain the larger ones.
The Young Nothosaurus is greeted by another inhabitant feeding on the small marine life, a Tanystropheus longobardicus. These marine reptiles have one of the longest necks in comparison to their body size it had 13 massive cervical (neck) vertebrae, though the first two were smaller and less strongly developed which make up only 20% of the entire animal's mass due to its light and hollow vertebrae. Their long, conical, and interlocking teeth like Nothosaurus adapted to eat fish. These smaller Tanystropheus hang out on more rocky shores while the larger Tanystropheus hydroides live in the open sandy areas. The larger species is the more famous and familiar they came here to mate as well, as females rested on the sand watching the males raise their necks high displaying their colorful dewlap throats. But sometimes fights begin to break out as two males in the center wrestle with one another slamming their chests and grabbing each other on both sides, they also slammed their necks at each other like giraffes and bite one another as the females watched. But then they scattered as a predator bounds after them but missed. It was a Ticinosuchus, an extinct genus of suchian archosaur; these small predators patrol the beaches searching for anything that washed up on the beach or small prey.
Soon the Nothosaurus leaves the beach and approaches the water and dives in. The first thing the female Nothosaurus sees is a vast coral reef. Shallow-water corals thrive in warm waters, with exposure to sunlight to help in photosynthesis, performed by the zooxanthellae that live within the coral tissue and provide nutrients to the coral which helps build their skeletons like these Scleractine or stony corals, Retiophyllia. Corals are colonies of small animals and these reefs provide homes to many animals like the Worthenia, an extinct gastropod sea snail, crawling along the coral feeding on decaying matter including fish that predators like Nothosaurus and Tanystropheus prey upon. It is also home to sea sponges like Solenolmia, sponges filter particles of food from the water by pumping it through tiny pores and then expelling it through a central opening. The sponges help the reef filter water, collect bacteria, and process carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus affecting the water quality. Swimming among the corals was this marine reptile, Odoiporosaurus, a pachypleurosaur. They were elongated animals, ranging in size from 0.2–1 meter (0.66–3.28 ft.), with small heads, long necks, paddle-like limbs, and long, deep tails. The limb girdles are greatly reduced, so it is unlikely these animals could move about on land. The widely spaced peg-like teeth project at the front of the jaws, indicating that these animals fed on fish and crustaceans which they devoured entirely and that their teeth regrew after they broke off.
One of the largest, most colorful, and most unusual fish was Foreyia as the Nothosaur approaches it curiously. It was a weird member of coelacanths, a lobe-finned fish. Coelacanths have been around since the early Devonian period and were once thought they went extinct with the dinosaurs until the rediscovery of the West Indian Ocean Coelacanth in 1938. They are known for their lobe-like fins and those lobes would evolve into limbs that allow the first vertebrae animals to crawl up onto land. What makes Foreyia different is its proportionally enormous head, a curved, beak-like maxilla, an underbite, and a low, horn-like point on its otherwise dome-like head. Unlike their relatives who would drift ambush hunters, its ecological role was that of the parrotfish. It feeds on coral and algae, using its tough beaks to scrape its food off rocks and coral skeletons. This diet leads to commonly ingesting bits of hard coral skeleton, which is later egested as a fine white powder. The Sand that is excreted from these fishes will fill the white sandy beaches of the Besano.
The Nothosaurus is approached by a curious pod of dolphin-like ichthyosaurs. These marine reptiles appeared in the Early Triassic and during that period they were the most diverse and dominant marine reptile group at the time. This is a pod of Mixosaurus, they small possessed a long tail with a low fin, suggesting it could have been a slow swimmer, but also possessed a dorsal fin for stability in the water. The jaws were narrow, with several sharp teeth, which would have been ideal for catching fish. They had relatively large skulls compared to their bodies, unlike the basal ichthyosaurs, but resembled fish-shaped ichthyosaurs that appeared later. They may have lived near shore or in a shelf-like habitat as it possesses more compact spongy bone within their long bones than other Ichthyosaurs.
The Nothosaurus also notices another pod of Ichthyosaurs, Besanosaurus. Unlike Mixosaurus, Besanosaurus had a less fish-shaped body, bearing a small skull, long trunk and tail, and elongated flippers while later ichthyosaurs developed fish-shaped body plans, but were large than Mixosaurus. It was an eel-like swimmer with moderate speed rapid acceleration and good maneuvering. Its elongated snout with cone-shaped teeth resembles those of gharials and river dolphins feeding mainly on small fish, cephalopods, and marine reptiles. These ichthyosaurs have come here to the shallows to have young, like Nothosaurus, ichthyosaurs gave birth live, but they are ovoviviparous, meaning the eggs incubated inside the body and hatched at birth. Soon the ichthyosaurs swam after some schools of small fish known as Meridensia, and a few Luganoia fish snatching them with their snouts of conical cone-shaped teeth.
As the Nothosaurus swims about it notices a Tanystropheus longobardicus swimming trying to snatch a fish only to be grabbed by the larger Tanystropheus hydroides as blood filled the water. As it swims to the surface to feed on the rest of the body, a few more Tanystropheus were swimming through the coral reefs snatching fish with their long necks, a shallow-water predator it uses its long neck to stealthy approach schools of fish or squid without disturbing its prey due to its large body size hiding among the coral and rocks. Upon selecting a suitable prey item, it would have dashed forward by propelling itself along the seabed or through the water, with both hind limbs pushing off at the same time. Tanystropehus lived a semi-aquatic lifestyle living around in shallow and coastal waters, they had nostrils above their snouts to help breathe oxygen when they had to return to the surface for air, and swam with their hind limbs would have been quite flexible and powerful according to muscle correlations on the legs, pelvis, and tail vertebrae it does by extending their hind limbs forward and then simultaneously retracting them, creating a powerful 'jump' forward.
The Nothosaurus approaches a sand-filled sea floor as she begins to hunt for food by digging into the sand. Based on paddle impressions from their Chinese relatives, Nothosaurus would have dug into the soft seabed with the rowing motions of their paddle-like limbs, churning up hidden benthic creatures that they snapped up. Soon fish start swimming out of hiding as the Nothosaurus snatches them with her sharp needle-shaped teeth, once caught, few animals would be able to shake themselves free from the mouth of a Nothosaurus. But she isn't the only one she is joined by other marine reptiles digging into the sand for seafood. Placodonts, this group of marine reptiles that appeared in the Middle Triassic resemble barrel-bodied lizards similar to the marine iguana of the Galapagos. They ate mollusks and so their teeth were flat and tough to crush shells. In the earliest periods, their size was probably enough to keep away the top sea predators of the time: the sharks. However, as time passed, other kinds of carnivorous reptiles began to colonize the seas, such as ichthyosaurs and nothosaurs, and later placodonts developed bony plates on their backs to protect their bodies while feeding. By the Late Triassic, these plates had grown so much that placodonts of the time, resembled the sea turtles of the modern day more than their ancestors without bony plates. Because of their dense bone and heavy armor plating, these creatures would have been too heavy to float in the ocean and would have used a lot of energy to reach the water's surface. For this reason, they lived in shallow waters.
Among them are two species, this armored one is Cyamodus had an armored carapace composed of irregular hexagonal plates, with the mouth containing a small number of large, rounded teeth that were likely involved in crushing hard-shelled organisms. The shell was a two-part carapace on the upper surface of the body. The larger half covered Cyamodus from the neck to the hips and spread out flat, almost encompassing the limbs. The second, smaller plate covered the hips and the base of the tail. The shells themselves are covered in hexagonal or circular plates of armor. The wing-like elongated flattened lateral spine served to brace the overlying sub-dermal carapace to provide a closer and better-braced association between the vertebrae and the carapace.
There is also the unarmored, Paraplacodus it resembles a large, scaly, tooth-filled newt. It was a small reptile, measuring about 1.5 meters (4.9 ft.) in total body length. These marine reptiles dig with their snouts and front limbs searching for mollusks crushing the shell with their teeth and shucking the flesh inside before discarding the shell's bits. A Pacodont's diet consisted of marine bivalves, brachiopods, and other invertebrates. They were notable for their large, flat, often protruding teeth, which they used to crush the mollusks and brachiopods that they hunted on the sea bed similar to walruses. The palate teeth were adapted for this durophagous diet, being extremely thick and large enough to crush thick shells. This is known as Bioturbation which changes the depth distribution of organic matter and can increase the inventory and quality of food for deposit feeders in sediments. It can increase nutrient fluxes leading to elevated rates of benthic primary production and increased microbial productivity as well. Suddenly one of the placodonts swimming to the surface to breathe spots something coming and swims away, this alerts the other placodonts and the Nothosaurus as they swam off in all directions from a threat swimming into view.
The Nothosaurus hides in a cave as it sees Besano's top apex aquatic predator swimming above, Cymbospondylus, a giant ichthyosaur although this species, Cymbospondylus buchseri was quite small compared to the other species in the genus measuring about 5.5 m (18 ft.) in length. Ichthyosaurs evolved from small (skull length 55 mm) ancestors such as to giant forms like Cymbospondylus in the span of only 2.5 million years, ichthyosaurs underwent rapid size increase early on in their evolutionary history. A part of it was their large eyes, the evolution of large eyes, a trait present in many ichthyosaurs, further assisted them in exploiting this food source efficiently especially to see in the deepest darkest parts of the ocean. It was an ambush predator with its elongated flexible body of early ichthyosaurs built to support an undulating swimming style while the powerful tail would provide bursts of speed adaptations to ambush prey. It mostly preyed on squid and fish, but sometimes would go after small marine reptile prey like our young Nothosaurus.
The Nothosaurus seeing the coast is clear swims out of the cave and back to shore to return to her colony. On the Beach, she sees a dead beached Cymbospondylus lying on its left side and its inner organs that have burst out from the belly, although a fish-eater Nothosaurs can sometimes scavenge on dead beached prey. The Adult and juvenile Nothosaurs joined by a bask of Ticinosuchus rip and tear the flesh with their jaws as they feasted on the body even the female Nothosaurus joins in on the feast. Soon dusk arrives and the Nothosaurus return to their sleeping areas as the female juvenile rests on a flat rock plateau overlooking the Tethys Sea as she falls asleep today was an adventure in the Besano Riveria and there will be new adventures in the future to come.
Trivia/References
-The Nothosaurus and Ticinosuchus feasting on a dead Cymbospondylus are based on a YouTube video titled, "Triassic Seas animation." by Julian Johnson-Mortimer, you can look him up on his YouTube Channel and Deviantart Account, but also based on African predators and scavengers feasting on a beached dead hippo including Nile Crocodiles, Spotted Hyenas, Vultures, Marabou Storks, and occasional Lions.
Olmagon
-The Tanystropheus hydroides getting eaten by the larger Tanystropheus longobardicus is based on the artwork "Not Cannibalism."
-The Foreyia fish having an ecological niche role of the parrotfish is based on its anatomy and the artwork, " S."
Speculative Behaviors/Fossil Evidence
-The Mating behaviors of Nothosaurus and Tanystropheus are based on Elephant Seals, Giraffes, Komodo Dragons, Anoles, and Fan-throated lizards.
-Nothosaurs giving birth live is based on a relative, Lariosaurus.
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The Next Story is "Dorset Holiday" it focuses on a female Plesiosauusr who explores the Dorset Coast of the Charmouth Mudstone Formation exploring strange and bizarre marine creatures.
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