Giant 150-million-year-old sea monter found

Published on October 27th, 2009 | by Sevaan Franks

The giant 2.4m long skull of a pliosaur has been found along the UK’s Jurassic Coast.

Palaeontologist Richard Forrest told the BBC: “I had heard rumours that something big was turning up. But seeing this thing in the flesh, so to speak, is just jaw dropping. It is simply enormous.”

Pliosaurs were a form of plesiosaur, a group of giant aquatic reptiles that dominated the seas around the same time that dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

They had short necks and huge, crocodilian-like heads that contained immensely powerful jaws and a set of huge, razor-sharp teeth.

Using four paddle-like limbs to propel their bulky bodies through the water, they made easy work of passing prey such as dolphin-like ichthyosaurs and even other plesiosaurs.

Tags: Extinct Animals, Fossils, Jurassic, Sea Monster, Skull, United Kingdom