An exceptionally well-preserved skull of a giant pliosaur - a prehistoric sea monster - has been discovered on a beach in Dorset, southern England, which may reveal secrets about these awe-inspiring creatures.
Pliosaurs ruled the oceans at a time when dinosaurs roamed the land. The fossil found is about 150 million years old, which is almost 3 million years younger than all other pliosaur finds. Researchers are analyzing the specimen to determine if it may be a species new to science.
First spotted in the spring of 2022, the fossil, along with its complex excavation and ongoing scientific research, is now detailed in the upcoming BBC documentary Attenborough and the Jurassic Sea Monster, presented by legendary naturalist Sir David Attenborough, who will air on February 14.
The massive size of the carnivorous marine reptile is so large that a skull excavated from a cliff on Dorset's "Jurassic Coast" is almost 2 meters long. In its fossilized form, the specimen weighs over half a metric ton. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, pliosaur species could reach lengths of up to 15 meters.
The fossil was buried deep in the rock, about 11 meters above the ground and 15 meters down the cliff, said local paleontologist Steve Etches, who helped discover it.
Extracting it proved a perilous task fraught with danger as the team raced against time in the period of good weather before summer storms approached and the rock eroded, possibly taking the rare and significant fossil with it.
Etches first learned of the fossil's existence when his friend Philip Jacobs called him after coming across the pliosaur's snout on the beach. Right from the start, the two were "quite excited because its jaws were closing together, indicating that the fossil was complete," the paleontologist said.
After using drones to map the rock and pinpoint the exact location of the rest of the dinosaur, Etches and his team began a three-week operation in which they carved out the rock while suspended in the air.
"It's a miracle we pulled it off," he said, "because we had one last day to pull this thing off, which we did at 9:30 p.m."
The paleontologist set about the task of painstakingly restoring the skull. There was a very frustrating moment as the mud and bone cracked, but "in the following days and weeks everything was like a puzzle. It took a long time, but every piece of bone was put back together," Etches said.
That the fossil remained in such good condition is a "wonder of nature," the scientist added. "It died in the right environment, there was a lot of sediment ... so when it died and went to the seabed, it was buried pretty quickly."
The nearly intact fossil illuminates the characteristics that made the pliosaur a truly fearsome predator, hunting down prey like the dolphin-like Ichthyosaurus. The apex predator with huge, razor-sharp teeth used a variety of senses, including sensory pits still visible on its skull that may have allowed it to detect changes in water pressure, according to the documentary.
According to Emily Rayfield, a professor of paleobiology at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, who participated in the documentary, the pliosaur had a bite twice as powerful as the saltwater crocodile, which today has the most powerful jaws in the world. The prehistoric marine predator could have rammed into a car, she says.
Andre Rowe, a postdoctoral researcher in palaeobiology at the University of Bristol, added that "the animal was so massive that I think it could have effectively hunted anything that had the misfortune of being in its space"./BGNES
