Reconstruction of Aigialosaurus.
Aigialosaurus is an extinct genus of marine or semiaquatic lizard from the Late Cretaceous. It is considered to be in the family called Aigialosauridae, which is a part of Mosasauroidea. It is only found in deposits near Hvar, Croatia, of the Cenomanian age. The genus contains only one legitimate species, A. dalmaticus. In accordance with relatively new molecular and morphological data, Aigialosaurus is the most ancient member of a long lineage which leads to giant Cretaceous marine reptiles called mosasaurs, which is a group closely related to snakes and among other extant squamates. It was a bijou, small marine reptile, and it had a complete skeleton, with a length of 65 cm (2.13 feet) long. Another primieval mosasauroid, Opetiosaurus, was thought to have been a second species of Aigialosaurus in 2009, known as "Aigialosaurus bucchichi", but this has not been received well by recent analyses.
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