Mosasaurus hoffmanni

Ok, so I've been under an art block regarding life restorations for quite a while now, and I have been thinking of overhauling my palaeoart style and techniques during that time. I decided to experiment with the new ideas, style, and techniques, and I think I'm happy with my new style, and I'm going to use this in future palaeoart. Anyway, without further ado, here's the first animal done under my new style, the late Cretaceous marine lizard Mosasaurus hoffmanni.
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Mosasaurus hoffmanni - Almost certainly not 17+ metres long even for the largest specimens, move on now...
(Mantell, 1829)

Temporal range: Late Cretaceous, Maastrichtian, ~70-65.5 Ma
Location: Western Europe, Russia, and North America

Length: Around ~8-12.5 metres
Probable mass: Around ~3-7 tonnes

Etymology: Hoffmann's lizard from the Meuse river


Mosasaurus hoffmanni is a species of large mosasaurine marine lizard that lived during the latest Cretaceous in the seas and oceans around the European islands, Russia, and North America. It was one of the first mosasaurs to be named and discovered, with it's remains first being unearthed from a St. Pietersburg chalk quarry, from the Maastricht in the Netherlands, in 1764. It was described as a species of whale ("big breathing fish" during the time) in 1790. To this day, the original specimen is catalogued as TM 7424.

Often thought to grow up to 17 metres or more based on early reconstructions from before more complete giant mosasaurs were discovered and described, those figures are most likely extremely excessive. This giant marine lizard, while massive, ends up far more modest in size when reconstructed rigorously. The body is rather long and bulky, but the tail is quite short compared to other giant mosasaurids like Tylosaurus and Hainosaurus.

The holotype specimen MNHNP AC9648 is known from a skull roughly about ~1.5 metres long, and likely would have belonged to an animal about ~10-11 metres long and approximately around 5 tonnes in life. The largest known specimen, uncovered from the Penza region in Russia, would have had a lower jaw about ~1.7 metres long when complete, and in life probably measured around ~12.5 metres long or so and massed close to 7 tonnes, a far cry from the 17+ metre long and 10+ tonne masses that are commonly believed, and perpetuated by the dinosaur survival game Saurian.

Mosasaurus probably mainly preyed on fish, other smaller mosasaurs, and plesiosaurs.
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Based on 's Mosasaurus hoffmanni skeletal reconstruction, which was the first truly rigorous attempt to reconstruct the proportions of the animal accurately over 200 years after it was originally discovered, and about 188 years after it was formally described as M. hoffmanni. Contrary to what you may have been told, Saurian's Mosasaurus isn't the most rigorous and accurate rendition of the animal, in fact it has a plethora of mistakes that the team refuses to acknowledge (including being far too big).
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UPDATE(11/3/2017): Removed the external ears and extended the caudal keel further down the tail after receiving some additional data about mosasaur inner ears and caudal osteological correlates. Credit to Onychodus for providing the papers.