Unknown location but look at the preservation of them teeth. Some form of oversized reptile.
AN ENORMOUS Jurassic pliosaur skull extracted from a cliff in Dorset, UK, is offering scientists a wealth of new information about these sea reptiles. “It’s very likely a new species,” says Judyth Sassoon at the University of Bristol, UK.
BNPS
The fossil was the subject of a new documentary, Attenborough and the Giant Sea Monster, which premiered on BBC One on 1 January and will air on PBS in the US in February. The skull is so well preserved that CT scans revealed the sensory pits on the snout (pictured above) were connected to blood vessels and nerves, allowing the pliosaur to detect changes in pressure and hunt prey in murky waters (pictured below, in a CGI image from the documentary).
BBC Studios
There is hope that the rest of the fossil is still intact in the cliff. “There may be evidence on its skeleton of how it met its death,” says Steve Etches, who led the team to extract and prepare the skull. Etches is shown below, examining the snout with David Attenborough, left, in a still from the documentary.
Sir David Attenborough and Steve Etches examine the fossilised snout of a pliosaur
BBC Studios
Surface scans of the specimen have helped scientists estimate the strength of its bite. Emily Rayfield, a palaeontologist at the University of Bristol, suggests its bite force would have been twice that of a saltwater crocodile, one of the most powerful known bites. Evidence of trihedral teeth, with two sharp cutting edges and striated grooves, is shown below.
David Stock
The grooves are believed to stop a vacuum forming when the teeth are plunged into prey, allowing the pliosaur to repeatedly and swiftly bite down, and further cementing its place as one of the deadliest predators of its time. The skull is on show at the Etches Collection in Dorset, UK.
Related Post
The entire tomb is filled with signs and symbols that mention Queen Nefertiti and after some time passed and linguistic experts managed to decipher the stories told here, the team was baffled.
The mystery of the Solar Temple of Abu Gurab and its “Star Gate” comes to light
Thuya, the mother of Queen Tiye, left a monumental legacy by becoming the grandmother of Akhenaten and Tutankhamun.
The oldest traditions lead us to believe that blacks were the first inhabitants of Mexico.
The REAL face of King Tut: The pharaoh had feminine hips, clubfoot, and protruding teeth according to the ‘virtual autopsy,’ which also revealed that his parents were brother and sister.
The “oldest gold of humanity” was found in the Varna necropolis, on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast