A day in the life of a plesiosaurus, an air-breathing, prehistoric, marine reptile, as she lays eggs, escapes other predators, searches for food, and fights a storm at sea.

This book introduces Plesiosaurus, a creature with a long, snakelike neck and round body.

Vertebrate evolution has led to the convergent appearance of many groups of originally terrestrial animals that now live in the sea. Among these groups are familiar mammals like whales, dolphins, and seals. There are also reptilian lineages (like plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, mosasaurs, thalattosaurs, and others) that have become sea creatures. Most of these marine reptiles, often wrongly called "dinosaurs", are extinct. This edited book is devoted to these extinct groups of marine reptiles. These reptilian analogs represent useful models of the myriad adaptations that permit tetrapods to live in the ocean. - First book in more than 80 years devoted exclusively to fossil marine reptiles - Documents the most current research on extinct marine reptiles - Prepared by the world's most prominent experts in the field - Well illustrated

Ninety million years ago, giant dinosaurs roamed the earth, pterosaurs flew through the air, and giant reptiles and fish hunted in the oceans. The area that is now Kansas was covered by water and one of its inhabi-tants was the plesiosaur—a reptile with an extremely long neck and a huge body. This early reader about the ancient plesiosaur brings the prehistoric world of this ocean-dwelling animal to life, explain-ing how scientists think these reptiles lived, hunted, and became extinct. Back matter explores other reptiles both ancient and modern and provides additional print, visual, and web resources.