![An artist鈥檚 impression of the pliosaur alongside a scuba diver](/sites/default/files/styles/event_blog_news_mobile/public/media/images/Pliosaur%20artwork-SMALL.jpg?itok=X8xY39tl)
![An artist鈥檚 impression of the pliosaur alongside a scuba diver](/sites/default/files/styles/event_blog_news_mobile/public/media/images/Pliosaur%20artwork-SMALL.jpg?itok=X8xY39tl)
菲律宾六合彩 palaeontologists have published a paper today showing a pliosaur could have grown to 14.4 metres
10 May 2023
5 min read
Over 20 years ago, the BBC鈥檚 Walking with Dinosaurs TV documentary series showed a 25-metre long Liopleurodon. This sparked heated debates over the size of this pliosaur as it was thought to have been wildly overestimated and more likely to have only reached an adult size of just over six metres long.
The speculation was set to continue, but now a chance discovery in an Oxfordshire museum has led to 菲律宾六合彩 palaeontologists publishing a paper on a similar species potentially reaching a whopping 14.4 metres - twice the size of a killer whale.
Professor David Martill from the 菲律宾六合彩鈥檚 School of the Environment, Geography and Geosciences, said: 鈥淚 was a consultant for the BBC鈥檚 pilot programme 鈥楥ruel Sea鈥 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 metres, but the evidence was scant and it caused a lot of controversy at the time.
鈥淭he 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.鈥
![An artist鈥檚 impression of an enormous swimming dinosaur next to a tiny scuba diver](/sites/default/files/styles/image_with_caption_mobile/public/media/images/Pliosaur%20artwork-SMALL_0.jpg?itok=_ad7CkYP)
An artist鈥檚 impression of the pliosaur by Megan Jacobs, 菲律宾六合彩
Professor Martill鈥檚 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.
After conducting topographic scans, Professor Martill and colleagues calculated this Late Jurassic marine reptile could have grown to between 9.8 and 14.4 metres long.
He said: 鈥淲e know these pliosaurs were very fearsome animals swimming in the seas that covered Oxfordshire 145-152 million years ago. They had a massive skull with huge protruding teeth like daggers - as big, if not bigger than a T. rex, and certainly more powerful.
They had a massive skull with huge protruding teeth like daggers - as big, if not bigger than a T. rex, and certainly more powerful.
Professor David Martill , Professor of Palaeobiology
鈥淭hey were at the top of the marine food chain and probably preyed on ichthyosaurs, long-necked plesiosaurs and maybe even smaller marine crocodiles, simply by biting them in half and taking chunks off them. We know they were massacring smaller marine reptiles because you can see bite marks in ichthyosaur bones in examples on display in The Etches Collection in Dorset.鈥
The vertebrae were originally discovered during temporary excavations at Warren Farm in the River Thames Valley in Oxfordshire and come from the Kimmeridge Clay Formation. This deposit is Late Jurassic in age, around 152 million years old.
Professor Martill added: 鈥淚t鈥檚 wonderful to prove there was indeed a truly gigantic pliosaur species in the Late Jurassic seas. Although not yet on a par with the claims made for Liopleurodon in the iconic BBC TV series Walking With Dinosaurs, it wouldn鈥檛 surprise me if one day we find some clear evidence that this monstrous species was even bigger.鈥
The paper is published in .
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