Paleontologists have unearthed four cervical vertebrae of Jurassic pliosaurid in the Kimmeridge Clay Formation near Abingdon, Oxfordshire, England. The specimens are noteworthy for their size, with a maximum width of 27 cm, maximum height of 22 cm and maximum length of 10 cm. Simple scaling and comparisons with cervical vertebrae of other Jurassic and Cretaceous pliosaurs suggest a total body length of between 9.8 m and 14.4 m for the Kimmeridge Clay pliosaur; likely the true length was towards the higher end of this range.
Pliosaurs were a type of short-necked plesiosaur: marine reptiles built for speed compared to their long-necked cousins.
They lived between 220 million years ago (Triassic period) and 70 million years ago (Cretaceous period) and were mostly found in the prehistoric seas that covered modern-day Europe.
Also known as pliosauroids, pliosaurs were not dinosaurs, but distant cousins of modern turtles.
They had four powerful flipper-like limbs, large crocodile-like heads, extremely powerful jaws and enormous teeth, and hunted fish, cephalopod mollusks and other marine reptiles.
“Despite their spectacular size, pliosaurids were relatively unknown in the public domain, until airing of the BBC TV animated documentary series Walking with Dinosaurs in 1999 when, in the episode, Cruel Sea a ‘star’ animal, the Middle Jurassic pliosaur Liopleurodon was controversially claimed to have been 25 m in length and to have weighed perhaps 150 tons,” said University of Portsmouth’s Professor David Martill and his colleagues.
“There is no unambiguous fossil evidence for any of these claims, with near complete Liopleurodon ferox skeletons indicating a length closer to 6.4 m.”
“There are, however, a number of isolated pliosaur bones from the Oxford Clay and Kimmeridge Clay formations of southern and eastern England that are from considerably larger individuals, though their generic identity remains largely unknown, as do their total…
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