Stories tagged pliosaur

Something like this: But fifty feet long, and not made out of colored pencils.
Courtesy Wikimedia CommonsEvery so often I tell myself, “JGordon, this is it. That was the last time. Never again shall you poop in your pants.”

And it seems a reasonable resolution, doesn’t it? I mean, I’m pretty much a grown man, and the time has long since passed for me to leave behind those childish things. Plus, I can’t keep buying pants at that rate. So I say, “Yes, JGordon, never again shall I do that,” and I walk out of the mall with a smile on my face.

And then paleontology goes and turns me into a liar. Two awesome new theropods discovered in Africa. Resolution gone. A pterosaur with a 40-foot wingspan. Lifetime ban from the public library. Now? Solid fossil evidence of the largest sea reptile ever recorded, a pliosaur fifty feet long. I won’t say exactly where I was when the, ah, full impact of the discovery hit me, but the pastor was not happy.

Anyway, the natural history of the world is now a little bit cooler. The partial skeleton of what is most likely an uncatalogued species of pliosaur was unearthed from a spectacularly productive fossil bed on Spitspergen, an island in the Arctic Svalbard chain. Portions of the animals snout, teeth, shoulder girdle, neck and back were found, as well as a nearly complete, 10-foot long flipper, enough remains to pretty definitively set the creature’s full length at about 50 feet. Other pliosaur remains have been discovered across the world that suggest sizes approaching that of the Svalbard specimen, but those are largely composed of isolated bones, and length estimates based on them may not be accurate.

Pliosaurs were marine reptiles (and so technically not dinosaurs) that lived in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, and became extinct around the same time as the dinosaurs did. They had large, “teardrop-shaped” bodies with long paddle like flippers, and massive, tooth-filled heads. The largest of them had jaws in the neighborhood of 9 feet, putting even the huge headed tyrannosaurs to shame. Their jaw muscles even outdid those of crocodiles, some of the most powerful biters to ever exist; large pliosaurs probably had three or four times more jaw muscles of crocodiles. A pliosaur like the Svalbard specimen, a plesiosaur paleontologists claims, “was big enough to pick up a small car in its jaws and bite it in half.”

It’s statements like that that are wasting away my clothing budget.

The fossil bed that the pliosaur came from continues to yield more marine reptile remains than any other excavation, including yet another partially uncovered pliosaur that may rival its neighbor in size.

Oh man.

Tags : pliosaur, marine reptiles, pants-ruining

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