Flexible tails could boost ancient sea predators' ambush speeds, fossil-based models suggest

Some of the giant marine reptiles that ruled the seas during the age of dinosaurs were better built for surprise attacks, while their relatives were better suited to chasing prey through open water, according to a Rutgers-led study. The science-journalism coverage adds useful context, while the strongest evidential footing still comes from the underlying data, papers or institutional documentation.

That matters because biology becomes more informative when an observed effect begins to look like a mechanism rather than an isolated pattern. The gap between identifying a correlation in biological data and understanding the causal chain that produces it is routinely underestimated, and the history of biomedical research is populated with associations that collapsed when the mechanism was sought and not found. A result that comes with a proposed mechanism, even a partial one, is more useful than a purely descriptive finding because it generates testable predictions that can narrow the hypothesis space. This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Add to Preferred Sources A mosasaur leaps from the water to snatch prey in this.

Researchers reconstructed the bodies of four kinds of mosasaurs from their fossil skeletons, then applied principles of physics to estimate how quickly each could surge forward. The calculations suggest that a particularly large Tylosaurus, one kind of mosasaur, could have reached about 15 miles per hour (24 kilometers per hour) with a single tail stroke.

The research, published in Current Biology, was led by Kiersten Formoso, an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources in the Rutgers. The team tested a range of assumptions about muscle power, tail flexibility and resistance from the water to see whether the findings held up under different conditions.

The advantage came largely from a longer, flexible section of the tail that allowed Platecarpus and Tylosaurus to curl it farther before sweeping it back. Its tail was built for sustained, tuna-like swimming rather than sudden bursts. " The findings agree with other clues to mosasaur lifestyles, including studies of bite force, tooth.

The broader interest lies in whether the reported effect points toward a real mechanism and not merely a reproducible but unexplained association. Biology has learned from decades of biomarker failures that correlation, even robust correlation, is not a substitute for mechanistic understanding. A pathway that can be traced from molecular interaction to cellular response to organismal phenotype provides a far stronger foundation for intervention than a statistical association discovered in a large dataset, however well the statistics are done.

Discover the latest in science, tech, and space with over 100, 000 subscribers who rely on Phys. org for daily insights. The study also has a New Jersey connection: Alongside the four main reconstructions, the team modeled exceptionally large animals, including a Mosasaurus based on a fossil from.

Because this item comes through Phys. org Biology as science journalism, it should be treated as contextual reporting rather than primary evidence. Good science reporting can identify why a result matters, connect it to the wider literature and make technical work readable, but the decisive evidence remains in the original paper, dataset, mission release or technical record. That distinction is especially important when a story is later repeated by aggregators, because repetition increases visibility, not evidential strength.

The next step is to test whether the effect repeats across different methods, cell types, model organisms and experimental conditions. Reproducibility is the first test, but mechanistic dissection is the second, and a result that passes both has a substantially better chance of translating into something clinically or biotechnologically useful. The path from a laboratory finding to an applied outcome typically takes a decade or more, and most findings do not complete it; the current result sits at the beginning of that process.

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