Turonian sea of Saxony

So, as some of you probably know I co-authored a paper on the turonian marine reptiles of Saxony. 
We describe here a bunch of historical specimens anew, we clarify previous errors, classify them and describe them in more detail.
The sparse fossil record opens a unseen window for this locality, a picture I tried to give some meat and color here. 
The basin which is preserved here was relative shallow, mostly with sandy ground and here and there some patch reefs. A diverse fauna of ammonites and smaller fish was present, animals which filled often the manu card of the larger predators like the sharks Cretolamna and Hybodus, but also fishes like Cimolichthys (very cool animal) and ichthyodectiformes. Small protostegids swam through the warm waters, with maybe just 70 cm flipperspan they were among the smallest of their family. Much faster than the turtles were the polycotylids and they were probably dwarfed all by large elasmosaurs which searched the open water for food.

My part of the paper was to write about the protostegid humeri from Freiberg and Dresden. I compared them to every humeri of this family I was able to find, but especially the Freiberg specimen was rather different. We refuse here to establish a name just on base of a humerus but these two bones probably represent new, still mysterious species.
Interestingly no mosasaur remains turned up so far.

It's a trend in Paleoart to throw in as many species in as possible when you work on a reconstruction of an ecosystem. I try to avoid that but in this case we tried to bring all our finds together. So I invented this setting around an elasmosaur carcass, a rather realistic excuse for the presence off all these species in one place. Large carcasses often attract a variety of small and bigger predators and in some cases you can observe the whole foodweb in one place. 

I need to thank Sven Sachs who asked me to participate in this little academic project and who did most of the work. 

Here a link to the paper: www.senckenberg.de/files/conte…