Assistant Professor Dr. Rebecca Totten Minzoni and recent Masters graduate Leah Travis Taylor received some news coverage on their recently published paper entitled “Oxygen isotopes from the teeth of Cretaceous marine lizards reveal their migration and consumption of freshwater in the Western Interior Seaway, North America” in Paleo3.
In the paper, they combined Leah’s Masters work with Dr. Totten Minzoni’s senior thesis to investigate a comparison of Alabama and Kansas mosasaurs. From oxygen isotope patterns in their teeth, they deduced that they drank freshwater weekly, probably due to limited osmoregulatory function like their modern sea snake relatives.
You can see their paper here. The news report on this can be seen here.