The skull of a colossal sea monster has been extracted from the cliffs of Dorset’s Jurassic Coast.
It belongs to a pliosaur, a ferocious marine reptile that terrorised the oceans about 150 million years ago.
The 2m-long fossil is one of the most complete specimens of its type ever discovered and is giving new insights into this ancient predator.
The skull will be featured in a special David Attenborough programme on BBC One on New Year’s Day.
Sir that’s a dragon.
20-40 ft long. Would have been epic to see one alive. Tho’ possibly also relatively brief.
Up to 70 feet according to the BBC article.
“He’s a big boy”
~ Steve Irwin
I wonder how many other skulls like this protruded from the cliffs, terrorizing seafarers of days gone by? Another possible contribution to our tales of the sea perhaps?
What an amazing find.
Lewis and Clark saw some serious shit on their trip across the US and back. It would have been something to see a 70-foot-long fish fossil in the middle of what is now Kansas, while having no clue how that was even possible.
It went extinct 150 million years ago so I don’t think it can have possibly bothered mariners of the past.
Imagine that thing swimming toward you with its mouth open
Any dinosaur sea creature swimming towards me would make the water around me brown
Learning from the noble squid, I see.
Some people are into that. Not me. Some people tho
Do it for science
A speedboat style crocodile, fuck everything about it. And it can climb mountains? Nope!
It’s hard to believe how well it’s preserved. They’re never this complete! It sounds like they might look for the rest of the skeleton, which will be exposed and lost to erosion anyway if it is there. If we’re lucky, we’ll also find clues about its eating habits, which isn’t out of the realm of probability considering how intact they found the skull. Truly remarkable, I really want to see that upcoming Attenborough documentary.
It’s wild to think about how many incredible fossils are out there right now, buried deep and not currently in a place that is being eroded so that we happen to stumble on them during our incredibly tiny slice of geological time.
Eating habits. Anything it wants to eat.
Steve Etches will put the skull on display next year at his museum in Kimmeridge - the Etches Collection.
I love that they’re going to display this in the local museum!
Leviathan?
Behemoth.
Wasn’t Behemoth a land animal?
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