Abstract
A new fauna of fossil marine reptiles is described from the Late Cretaceous Nanaimo Group of Vancouver Island. The fossils are from the Haslam and Pender formations (upper Santonian) near Courtenay, British Columbia, and include elasmosaurid plesiosaurs, turtles, and mosasaurs. This is only the second fauna of Late Cretaceous marine reptiles known from the Pacific Coast, the other being from the Moreno Formation of California (Maastrichtian). The new Nanaimo Group fossils are some 15 million years older than those from the Moreno Formation. However, like the California fauna, there are no polycotylid plesiosaurs, and one of the mosasaurs is a new genus. This reinforces the provinciality of the Pacific faunas and their isolation from contemporaneous faunas in the Western Interior Seaway.
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