Norwegian scientists have discovered a "treasure trove" of fossils belonging to giant sea reptiles that roamed the seas at the time of the dinosaurs.
The 150 million-year-old fossils were uncovered on the Arctic island chain of Svalbard - about halfway between the Norwegian mainland and the North Pole.
The finds belong to two groups of extinct marine reptiles - the plesiosaurs and the ichthyosaurs.
One skeleton has been nicknamed The Monster because of its enormous size.
The Monster is an 8m long pliosaur with a most complete skeleton of such an animal ever found:
Read the details...
- Log in to post comments
More like this
I have to admit that I don't find trace fossils - the vast majority of which are footprints - that interesting. But some trace fossils are very neat and provide excellent information on behaviour and lifestyle. Examples include pterosaur take-off traces, the trackway of the little theropod that…
tags: Icadyptes salasi, giant penguin, ornithology, birds, avian
Two fossils recently discovered in Peru reveal that early penguins responded differently to natural climate change than scientists would have predicted. The larger skull, Icadyptes salasi (top), would have been fearsome to encounter…
Fossilized mosasaur skull (source linked from image).
Mosasaurs are marine reptiles, not dinosaurs.
But the reason I show this fossil here will (hopefully) become more obvious after you read the story.
A 2 kilometer-long treasure trove of fossilized bones, teeth and claws from dinosaurs and…
On to our second day of talks (read part I first): things kicked off with Mike A. Taylor and Angela Milner's talk on the history and collections of Street. Pinpointing the locations of original quarries is always difficult as exact records are often not kept, and of course the areas once used for…