Besanosaurus

The name of this prehistoric animal   refers to Besano, a small town in the Vareze province of northern Italy where it was first discovered. Besanosaurus is a primitive ichthyosaur that lived in the middle Triassic period, around 235 million years ago. Its outward appearance was somewhat similar to the dolphin of today. It was 6 m long, and weighed approximately one ton. It had a long and thin snout, adjusted to its aquatic environment, but its skull was thick and broad, extending into a bulky body with no dorsal fin. Its long eel-like tail made Besanosaurus a fairly efficient swimmer, albeit at a moderate speed, with rapid acceleration and good maneuvering. Instead of fore and hind limbs, this aquatic reptile had two pairs of fins to propel it in sea water. Besanosaurus inhabited a prehistoric sea then located in the basin of today's Adriatic, at the time when the north of what is now the region of Lombardy in northern Italy was at the bottom of today's Mediterranean Sea. Besanosaurus was‭ ‬a‭ ‬primitive icthyosaur that lacked a dorsal fin and had a more eel-like tail rather than the fish-like tail seen in later more advanced genera.‭ ‬The jaws were long and thin,‭ ‬filled with small conical teeth for trapping marine organisms.‭ ‬The eyes that were around twenty centimetres in diameter may have been a deep water adaptation for seeing and hunting in the black of deep water.‭ ‬In fact,‭ ‬other shastasaurid ichthyosaurs are all envisioned as being relatively slow ‬hunters of deep water cephalopods that descend to the gloom to hide from other predators that can only see well in light conditions.‭ ‬The presence of four unborn embryos inside the type specimen of Besanosaurus not only indicates it was a female,‭ ‬but that at least some genera of ichthyosaurs were capable of giving birth to a few young. At six meters in length you might think that Besanosaurus was big,‭ ‬but in reality this was less than a third of the length of its giant relative Shastasaurus.