Hyphalosaurus lingyuanensis (Sinohydrosaurus) Chinese water Dragon

This is an ULTRA RARE fossil and a beautiful specimen.

Comes complete in a  Riker presentation box.

I have gently felt the skeleton and it is three dimentional!

Comes with a Certification - hence the price

This 125million year old reptile fossil is an Hyphalosaurus linguianensis and was found in the Yixian Formation in Lingyuan, Liaoning Province in northeast China.

This reptile was formally described and named Sinohydrosaurus in 1999 by Li Jianjun and colleagues of the Bejing Natural History Museum. This name translates into "China" (sino) "Water" (saurus) with the suffix "lingyuanensis" added to honour the place of its discovery. 

Also in 1999, working independently, GoaKeqin and others at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Bejing named the same species "Hyphalosaurus lingyuanensis" - being completely unaware that they were working with counter-slab of the same specimen that the other team was studying!! The two names are used interchangeably today, although Sinohydrosaurus  is easier to remember while Hyphalosaurus is now the official name.

Hyphalosaurus was neither a fish nor an amphibian. Rather, it was a reptile that phylogenetically descended from a land-dwelling ancestor (similar to how the ancestors of whales were once land dwellers) to become a fresh-water dweller. It looks very similar to the Keichousaurus but is smaller and differs in the osteological structure by having no clavicles: instead having a T-Shaped interclavicle. In addition, it lived in the Cretaceous Period 125 million years ago, about 100 million years later than the Keichousaurus.