Elasmosauridae
| Elasmosaurids Temporal range: Late Triassic - Late Cretaceous, 210–66 Ma |
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| Reconstructed skeleton of Elasmosaurus platyurus in the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center in Woodland Park, Colorado. | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Reptilia |
| Superorder: | †Sauropterygia |
| Order: | †Plesiosauria |
| Clade: | †Xenopsaria |
| Family: |
†Elasmosauridae Cope, 1869 |
| Genera | |
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See text |
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| Synonyms | |
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Cimoliasauridae Persson, 1960 |
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See text
Cimoliasauridae Persson, 1960
Elasmosauridae was a family of plesiosaurs. They had the longest necks of the plesiosaurs and survived from the Late Triassic to the end of the Cretaceous. Their diet mainly consisted of crustaceans and molluscs.
The earliest elasmosaurids were small, about 3 m (9.8 ft). At the end of the Cretaceous, elasmosaurids grew as large as 14 m (46 ft), such as Elasmosaurus. Their necks were the longest of all the plesiosaurs, with anywhere between 32 to 76 (Albertonectes) cervical vertebrae They weighed up to several tons.
The family Elasmosauridae was erected by Cope in 1869, and anchored on the genus Elasmosaurus.
Elasmosauridae (Cope, 1869) is a stem-based taxon defined in 2010 (and in earlier studies in a similar manner) as "all taxa more closely related to Elasmosaurus platyurus than to , , Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus or Polycotylus latipinnis". The cladogram below follows, showing only Elasmosauridae interrelationships, the results of O’Gorman et al. (2015) who performed the most inclusive phylogenetic analysis focusing on Elasmosauridae interrelationships to date.
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