"Hic sunt dracones," say the warnings on ancient sea maps — "Here be dragons." Fictitious as tales of that warning might be, its meaning is clear: "We don't know what's out there, so take care." Such advice would have carried immense, if obvious, weight in an uncharted world full of far more mystery than our modern, GPS-mapped globe. But sometimes, human imagination and paleontological reality align, and sea monsters turn out to be real, even if it takes tens or even hundreds of millions of years to find out.

But the word "monster" is a tricky one. We're not talking about cryptids in this article, like the ever-elusive Loch Ness Monster in Scotland . We're talking mostly about fossilized reptiles from the Mesozoic Era (about 252 million to 66 million years ago) that call to mind stories

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