Posted on 10/05/2006 11:10:16 AM PDT by dennisw
An illustration of how the Pliosaur may have looked while hunting. The find lies on a mountain slope. The labels in the photo show the fallen snout (left), the head, and the vertebrae visible in the ground.PHOTO: ARNE NAKREM The snout of the Pliosaur, shown in relation to the size of the creature's head, and an adult human.
The discovery of the fearsome giant lizard, a sort of massive four-finned crocodile, is expected to make waves in paleontology circles. Until now only smaller parts of the predator, which could be up to 10 meters long, have been found in England, Russia and Argentina. The Svalbard specimen is probably 8-9 meters long.
This morning special web pages devoted to the find were published by the University of Oslo (UiO) this morning. The unique find of a complete skeleton was made on August 5 this year but kept completely secret until the announcement on Thursday.
Perspective
"The Pliosaur is the sea's answer to Tyrannosaurus Rex, just with an even bigger head. Imagine a creature nearly as big as a bus. With teeth the size of cucumbers. Visualize these teeth in a jaw where a grown man can lie down on the tongue and be swallowed whole. This is the beast that we have now found on Svalbard," said a jubilant Jørn Harald Hurum, associate professor at the Natural History Museum at UiO.
Bjørn Funke, one of the members of the 11-day paleontological expedition to Svalbard this summer, found parts of the Pliosaur skull on the evening of August 5. Even after just a few minutes examination the researchers could conclude that they had found "a huge one".
The find
"The skull is reckoned to be 2.1 meters long and the vertebrae stretch out at least six meters along the side of the mountain," Hurum said. "The preservation conditions in the black slate at the site are perfect. Only a few vertebrae and the snout had fallen a short way down the side of the mountain. The rest awaits a major excavation in 2007," Hurum said.
"We collected pieces of the snout and later glued them together. The roots of the teeth that were in the snout bone were triangular in outline, this is a sure sign of the Pliosaur. An American plesiosaur specialist with the expedition identified it on the spot," Hurum said.
They also found vertebrae the size of hub caps sticking out of the slate. The expedition found a total of 28 skeletons, 27 of them smaller sea lizards.
At first I thought this was yet another thread about Mark Foley.
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The scale drawing is a wee bit disappointing.
But the earth is only 6,000 years old! /s
Sensational Find!
Oh My Gosh! On the SLOPE of a mountain? Is it possible it was a victim of the great flood?
Formidable beast.
Coming to a movie theater soon.....
Chicago records indicate it voted for Kerry in 2004...
"Tyrannosaurus Rex of the Sea"???
Maybe Tyrannosaurus Rex was the "Pliosaur of the Land"?
Another name for Leviathan?
fish on
If the rock is sedimentary, it is more likely that it was once a sea bed that was pushed upward to become a mountain. Next time you pass through the Salt Lake valley, take a look at the Wasatch range. Definitely sedimentary pushed up into a mountain.
Well, it certainly had to be some kind of cataclysmic event to have become fossilized, right?
Fragmentary remains found in the UK, of another Jurassic Pliosaur, Liopleurodon (featured in the BBC's 'Walking with Dinosaurs' program), suggest a maximum size for that animal of perhaps 60 feet in length, with a 15-foot head.
So they got whale-size...there were also some Cretaceous Mosasaurs that got close to that size.
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Did they find all of the skeletons within close proximity of
one another? Would it be a feeding zone that was inundated
and the fossils preserved that way? What type of event
could cause that many animals to be buried so quickly?
Was there evidence of volcanism, or tectonic shift? Was
it sedimentary rock?, etc...the brief news report didn't
mention any of that...would be fascinating...
"Well, it certainly had to be some kind of cataclysmic event to have become fossilized, right?"
No. Dying (for whatever reason) and sinking into muck works real well, too.
Not really on the same scale of things, but after the recent rains changed the course of the creek that goes through our ranch, I found a calf half in the mud -- that look like she had just died and was my missing calf.
Well, she had my great, great, great, great (yes, 4 greats) grandfather's brand on her.
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