An artist’s impression of the pliosaur. Credit: Megan Jacobs, University of Portsmouth
SciTechDaily has a story about some truly huge pliosaurs that lived during the Jurassic Period. A paper in the journal Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association describes a vertebrae, which suggests a pliosaur that may have reached almost 15 meters in length as depicted by Liopleurodon in the BBC program "Walking with Dinosaurs".
More than two decades ago, the depiction of a 25-meter-long Liopleurodon in the BBC’s documentary series, Walking with Dinosaurs, instigated fervent discussions about the true size of this pliosaur. The portrayal was generally deemed as excessively exaggerated, with the more accepted theory suggesting an adult Liopleurodon would have measured just over six meters.
This speculation was expected to continue, however, a serendipitous finding in an Oxfordshire museum has now spurred paleontologists from the University of Portsmouth to publish a research paper suggesting that a similar species could reach a staggering length of 14.4 meters, twice the size of a killer whale.
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 that 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 vertebrates.”
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.
