An international team of researchers, led by Palaeontologists of the University of Liège, has investigated the biting capabilities of extinct predatory marine reptiles, revealing how these formidable predators could coexist within the same ecosystem. This work sheds new light on the hunting strategies of long-extinct predators that dominated the seas during the Age of Dinosaurs.
How can we infer the hunting strategies of extinct predators? A multidisciplinary team of palaeontologists, biologists, and engineers from ULiège, now provides an answer to that question. By combining palaeontological data with cutting-edge 3D modeling and engineering simulations, the team recreated the biting behaviour of marine predators which inhabited an ancient sea that covered North America approximately 80 million years ago.
“Every ecosystem, even underwater, has a limited amount of food resources for predators,” explains Francesco Della Giustina, palaeontologist at the EDDy Lab . “The long-term co-occurrence of multiple large predators we see in North America during the Cretaceous suggests that they occupied subtly different ecological roles, targeting different types of prey rather than directly competing. While palaeontologists have long proposed such hypotheses, new technologies now allow us to test them quantitatively.”
The research team generated 3D models of the skulls and mandibles of coexisting marine reptiles: the plesiosaurs and the mosasaurs. The cranial musculature of each species was reconstructed, and the force of each muscle that closed the jaw was estimated. The team then applied a computational approach adapted from engineering, known as finite element analysis, to simulate the patterns of stress and strain on the bones during biting under realistic conditions. The researchers could then observe the mechanical behaviour of the jaws across many different species. The team identified clear differences in biting performance across predatory species, which can be translated into distinct capabilities and therefore, probably distinct behaviours. Some species likely occupied an apex predator niche (i.e. eating almost anything else on the food-chain) while other appear specialized to feed on smaller, softer, and more agile prey, such as small fish or cephalopods (e.g. squid).
“The mechanical performance of the skull provides key insights into the ecological roles of these animals,” adds Francesco Della Giustina. “We can now test, in a virtual environment, behaviours that would otherwise remain inaccessible in the fossil record. This opens new perspectives on how these predators lived, interacted, and evolved”.
In other words, by combining fossils with modern technologies, researchers are beginning to reconstruct how these ancient animals functioned as living organisms—bringing us closer than ever to understanding life in prehistoric oceans.
Palaeontology
Distinct feeding biomechanics in Late Cretaceous marine reptiles from the Western Interior Seaway
25-Mar-2026