Fossil evidence confirms that predators decapitated these long-necked reptiles

Newswise — In the age of dinosaurs, many marine reptiles had extremely long necks compared to reptiles today. While it was clearly a successful evolutionary strategy, paleontologists have long suspected that their long-necked bodies made them vulnerable to predators. Now, after almost 200 years of continued research, direct fossil evidence confirms this scenario for the first time in the most graphic way imaginable.

Researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology on June 19 studied the unusual necks of two Triassic species of Tanystropheus, a type of reptile distantly related to…