An artist’s impression of the pliosaur. Credit: Megan Jacobs, University of Portsmouth
Phys.org has a story about the size of the large marine reptiles that swam the seas of the Jurassic Period. Just how big was Liopleurodon, a large pliosaur from that time? The BBC's "Walking with Dinosaurs" TV documentary series showed it as 25-meters-long, which was deemed vastly overestimated. New evidence, from the rediscovery of a similar species in the Oxfordshire museum, puts the length at around 14.4 meters, about twice the size of a modern killer whale. The research, led by to University of Portsmouth paleontologists, was published in the journal Proceedings of the Geologist's Association.
Professor David Martill from the University of Portsmouth's School of the Environment, Geography and Geosciences, said, "I was a consultant for the BBC's pilot program 'Cruel Sea' and I hold my hands up—I got the size of Liopleurodon horrendously wrong. I based my calculations on some fragmentary material which suggested a Liopleurodon could grow to a length of 25 meters, but the evidence was scant and it caused a lot of controversy at the time.
"The size estimate on the BBC back in 1999 was overdone, but now we have some evidence that is much more reliable after a serendipitous discovery of four enormous vertebrate."
Professor Martill's co-author, Megan Jacobs, was photographing an ichthyosaur skeleton at Abingdon County Hall Museum, while Dave looked through drawers of fossils. He found a large vertebra and was thrilled to discover the curator had three more of them in storage.
The vertebrae are clearly identifiable as being closely related to a Pliosaurus species or similar animal. Pliosaurs were like plesiosaurs, but with a bigger elongated head, similar to a crocodile, and a shorter neck. They had four flippers, which acted as powerful paddles to propel them through water and a relatively short tail.
