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In the spring of 2022, Philip Jacobs, an artist and hunter, was walking along the Jurassic Coast in southern England when he came across a nose.
It was about two feet long, complete with teeth, and it looked like it came from an ancient beast called a pliosaur. When the crew returned days later with a drone, they found the nose that had fallen from a high cliff on the beach – with the rest of the skull embedded in the rock.
The more than six-foot-long fossil, with a complete skull and no bones missing, is the “find of a lifetime,” one expert said.
“There are some special features in there that we haven’t seen in previous finds,” Steve Etches, a paleontologist who has been collecting fossils for more than 40 years and was involved in the excavation, said. on the phone. Monday. “And it’s perfect. Now the whole skull is there, no bones are missing.”
Pliosaurs were the largest reptiles that ever lived, said Mr. Etches, and reigned at the top of the marine food chain of the Jurassic Period. They were probably solitary hunters who preyed on plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs, other marine creatures, he added.
“They are like lions on the Serengeti,” said Mr. Etches about pliosaurs. “You have a pride of lions, but thousands of antelopes and everything else. It’s like the Jurassic sea.”
The skull is trapped inside Etches Collection Museum of Jurassic Marine Life in Kimmeridge, about seven miles west of the Jurassic Coast and more than 100 miles southwest of London. Said Mr. Etches the museum is working to put the skull in a display case for viewing in January.
Pliosaurs lived between 200 million and 65.5 million years ago, and could grow to over 40 feet in length. With very strong jaws, large flat teeth and sword-like teeth, they could quickly hunt and crush animals into large pieces, said David Martill, a professor of paleobiology at the University of Portsmouth in England. , is not affected by the acquisition. “Nothing in the sea can survive an attack,” he said.
The first pliosaur fossils were found in the 1820s on the Jurassic Coast, and further research has expanded scientists’ understanding of the species. But there was nothing close to the almost complete skull, said Dr. Martill. “One, it’s really big,” he added. “It’s also very well preserved.”
The skull may offer new clues about the pliosaur, which had a nose that funneled water into its mouth, allowing it to smell and hunt prey. Scientists hope the skull will shed more light on this body and, ultimately, the structure of the Jurassic sea ecosystem. More information about the skull will appear in the documentary “Attenborough and the Jurassic Sea Monster,” broadcast on PBS in February.
“We want to compare that organization with other ecosystems, Cretaceous, and even modern, to see if they are organized in the same way,” said Dr. Martill. The fact that some vertebrae are still attached to the skull suggests that the rest of the pliosaur may be in the rock, waiting to be found, he added.
Surely Mr. Etches, but the excavation will not be cheap: It can cost about 250,000 pounds, or about $300,000, which he hopes to raise.
“We really need to get it out,” he said, pointing to the crew of people who helped reveal the find. “And they’re doing it for the best reasons, for science, and so that people around the world can benefit from the information we get.”