The Kronosaurus was a massive marine predator with a fearsome jaw, big enough to swallow an adult human whole. They had huge teeth — about 12 inches long from the base to the tip, which they used to eat almost anything they could get their teeth on during the Early Cretaceous.
“In terms of size, they are some of the biggest,” says Leslie Noe, a paleontologist at the University of the Andes in Bogota, Colombia.
And the fearsome jaw is all we know about the Kronosaurus queenslandicus — the only species that nearly everyone agrees is a Kronosaurus. Much of the rest of the genus of large pliosaurs, that were formerly considered Kronosaurs, have since been reassigned to other branches of the large, short-necked pliosaur family.
The Kronosaurus Discovery
Albert Heber Longman described the K. queenslandicus in 1924 and named it after Queensland, the Australian state where his predecessor had originally discovered the species decades earlier. The “Kronos” part of the moniker referred to the titan of Greek legend, Cronus.
