#palaeontologists

Gigantic Skull of Prehistoric Sea Monster Found on England’s ‘Jurassic Coast’

The remarkably well-preserved skull of a gigantic pliosaur, a prehistoric sea monster, has been discovered on a beach in the county of Dorset in southern England, and it could reveal secrets about these awe-inspiring creatures.

Pliosaurs dominated the oceans at a time when dinosaurs roamed the land. The unearthed fossil is about 150 million years old, almost 3 million years younger than any other pliosaur find. Researchers are analyzing the specimen to determine whether it could even be a species new to science.

Originally spotted in spring 2022, the fossil, along with its complicated excavation and ongoing scientific investigation, are now detailed in the upcoming BBC documentary “Attenborough and the Jurassic Sea Monster,” presented by legendary naturalist Sir David Attenborough, that will air February 14 on PBS.

Such was the enormous size of the carnivorous marine reptile that the skull, excavated from a cliff along Dorset’s “Jurassic Coast,” is almost 2 meters (6.6 feet) long. In its fossilized form, the specimen weighs over half a metric ton. Pliosaurs species could grow to 15 meters (50 feet) in length, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica.

The fossil was buried deep in the cliff, about 11 meters (36 feet) above the ground and 15 meters (49 feet) down the cliff, local paleontologist Steve Etches, who helped uncover it, said in a video call.

Extracting it proved a perilous task, one fraught with danger as a crew raced against the clock during a window of good weather before summer storms closed in and the cliff 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, they were “quite excited, because its jaws closed together which indicates (the fossil) is complete,” Etches said.

After using drones to map the cliff and identify the rest of the pliosaur’s precise position, Etches and his team embarked on a three-week operation, chiseling into the cliff while suspended in midair.

“It’s a miracle we got it out,” he said, “because we had one last day to get this thing out, which we did at 9:30 p.m.”

Etches took on the task of painstakingly restoring the skull. There was a time he found “very disillusioning” as the mud, and bone, had cracked, but “over the following days and weeks, it was a case of …, like a jigsaw, putting it all back. It took a long time but every bit of bone we got back in.”

It’s a “freak of nature” that this fossil remains in such good condition, Etches added. “It died in the right environment, there was a lot of sedimentation … so when it died and went down to the seafloor, it got buried quite quickly.”

Fearsome top predator of the seas

The nearly intact fossil illuminates the characteristics that made the pliosaur a truly fearsome predator, hunting prey such as the dolphinlike ichthyosaur. 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.

The pliosaur had a bite twice as powerful as a saltwater crocodile, which has the world’s most powerful jaws today, according to Emily Rayfield, a professor of paleobiology at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom who appeared in the documentary. The prehistoric marine predator would have been able to cut into a car, she said.

Andre Rowe, a postdoctoral research associate of paleobiology at the University of Bristol, added that “the animal would have been so massive that I think it would have been able to prey effectively on anything that was unfortunate enough to be in its space.”

By Issy Ronald.

It's not like they wouldn't have serious journeys due to their job as paleontologists.

I’ve never heard of that scenario before like pretending giants ass dinosaurs are coming to kill you but slipping one in still 😭

Yes he would love it. He can do both as long as they compliment each other and don’t aim to take away his scholarly interests

It’s a 2022 Talking with… !

The discovery of an ancient cephalopod fossil could be about to rewrite octopus history. 

Finding properly fossilised octopus fossils is difficult, due to the animal’s climate and soft, fleshy body. Enter Syllipsimopodi bideni, a ten armed, 330 million year old octopus fossil that was donated to the Ontario Museum in 1988. And with scientists recently taking a closer look, some have suggested that it is a vampyropod, a type of cephalopod, and one of the few of its kind, as they told Nature Communications on March 8. If these scientists are correct, that would make this vampyropod the oldest octopus ancestor by about 80 million years. “This is overturning about 100 years of science in cephalopod evolution,” says invertebrate palaeontologist Christopher Whalen, to Nature Communications. 

However, the true identity of the creature hinges on whether or not it has a gladius, named after the Roman Sword of the same name. The gladius is a hard internal body part identified by its slender growth lines along the fossil’s edge. But not every scientist believes there to be a gladius at all. 

“That’s not the gladius, I’m sorry,” says Christian Klug, a cephalopod palaeontologist at the University of Zurich, to Nature Communications. Some, like Mr Klug, are arguing that the ‘gladius’ is really just a series of chambers found in shells of earlier cephalopods. This sort of debate is apparently the norm in palaeontology circles. The specific identifications of body parts, organs and bones can alter drastically even depending from the angle you look at the specimen from. But that doesn’t mean that the identification process is all over the place. Palaeontologists need a firm grasp on subjects like zoology, botany, anatomy, and even geology to do what they do, as well a deep understanding of the fossilisation process. Yet even in perfectly preserved fossils and specimens, observed by top notch palaeontologists, there may be differences in how they are interpreted. Some scientists may choose more technical methods, some may choose to focus on more specific parts of the fossilised creature. The validity of the determination ultimately relies on how reasonable it is, given the science.

But in the case of S.bideni here, the discovery of more specimens, advanced technology, and more research being put into their findings and identification could lead to scientists getting the right answer. 

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A Rare 38-Million-Year-Old Snake Fossil Found in Wyoming

A snake fossil recently discovered in Wyoming and dated at tens of millions of years old has led to new insights into the evolution and diversification of boas and pythons.

The newly discovered species, named Hibernophis breithaupti, lived in North America 34 million years ago. It was found by scientists in a burrow in western Wyoming where four fossilized creatures were found intertwined.