[ad_1]
Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news about amazing discoveries, scientific advances and more.
CNN
—
The remarkable skull of a giant pliosaur, an ancient sea monster, has been found on a beach in Dorset county in southern England, and it could reveal secrets about to these dangerous creatures.
Pliosaurs ruled the seas when dinosaurs roamed the land. The fossil found is about 150 million years old, nearly 3 million years younger than any other pliosaur found. Researchers are studying the specimen to see if it could be a new species in science.
First discovered in spring 2022, the fossil, with its complex findings and ongoing scientific research, is now described in the upcoming BBC documentary “Attenborough and the Jurassic Sea Monster,” presented by the naturalist Sir David Attenborough, which will be published on February 14. PBS.
The largest marine animal, the skull, excavated from a cliff on the Jurassic Coast of Dorset, is almost 2 meters (6.6 feet) long. In its fossilized form, the specimen weighs more than half a metric ton. Pliosaurs species can grow to 15 meters (50 feet) long, accordingly Encyclopaedia Britannica.
The object was buried deep in the rock, about 11 meters (36 feet) above the ground and 15 meters (49 feet) below the rock, local paleontologist Steve Etches , who helped open it, told CNN in a phone call.
The removal of a dangerous task, one fraught with danger as crews raced against the clock for a window of good weather before the summer storms closed in and eroded the cliff, may have taken and something unusual and important.
Etches first became aware of fossil life when his friends Philip Jacobs called him when he came across the pliosaur’s nose on the beach. From the beginning, they were “very excited, because its jaws are closed together to show (the fossil) that it’s finished,” Etches said.
After using drones to map the rock and determine the exact location of the pliosaur remains, Etches and his team began a three-week operation, throwing them into the rock. while being held in the middle.
“It’s a miracle that we found it,” he said, “because we found it on the last day, which we did at 9:30 pm”
Etches did the work of painstakingly reconstructing the skull. There was a time when he had “extreme frustration” as the soil cracked, and the bone, but “in the days and weeks that followed, it was a state of …, like a fan, all are put back. It took a long time to get all the bones back in.”
It is a “diversity of nature” that this fossil remains in such good condition, added Etches. “It died in the right environment, there was a lot of mud … so when it died and went to the seabed, it was buried quickly.”
The nearly complete fossil sheds light on the traits that made the pliosaur a truly formidable, predatory dolphinlike ichthyosaur. The apex predator with large, sharp-toothed teeth used a variety of senses, including two eardrums still visible on its skull that may have been able to detect changes in water pressure, according to records.
The pliosaur was twice as strong as the sea crocodile, which has the strongest jaws in the world today, according to Emily Rayfield, a professor of paleobiology at the University of Bristol in the UK appeared on the paper. The ancient marine would have been able to cut through a car, he said.
Andre Rowe, a postdoctoral researcher of paleobiology at the University of Bristol, added that “the animal would have been very large and I think it could have preyed on anything that didn’t succeed in its opportunity.”