Globidens Pronunciation

Fun Facts

• ✓Globidens teeth are so unusually round and smooth that when the first fossils were found, scientists initially struggled to believe they belonged to a reptile at all, because no living lizard has teeth anything like them.
• ✓Globidens lived at the very end of the Age of Dinosaurs, sharing its ocean with giant mosasaurs like Mosasaurus and Tylosaurus, but it carved out its own niche by eating prey nobody else could crack open.
• ✓Fossils of Globidens have been found on five continents, meaning this animal patrolled warm shallow seas that covered enormous parts of what are now dry land regions including the American South, North Africa, and South America.
• ✓The largest known Globidens species, Globidens alabamaensis, was described from Alabama and its skull alone measured over 2 feet long, with tooth crowns that were nearly perfectly hemispherical, shaped almost like gumdrops.
• ✓Globidens is one of only a tiny handful of mosasaurs known to have been a shell-crusher, making it the prehistoric ocean equivalent of a modern-day sheepshead fish or sea otter, animals that also crush hard-shelled prey with specially adapted teeth.