I've always had a thing for fossils ever since I was little (it must have been that school trip to the Natural History Museum) and my visit to Lyme Regis a couple of months ago sparked off several hours of fossil hunting on the beach (I found several small ammonites!) and a good few hours visiting the Fossil Museum and boring my partner to death (he could pass for an old fossil hehe).
Anyway I don't think my fossil hunting adventure quite matches up to the one reported on the BBC News website a couple of weeks ago, where Norwegian scientists discovered fossils belonging to giant sea reptiles that roamed the seas at the time of the dinosaurs. It reported that palaeontologists from the University of Oslo's Natural History Museum discovered the 150 million-year-old fossils during fieldwork in a remote part of Spitsbergen, the largest island in the Svalbard archipelago, about halfway between the Norwegian mainland and the North Pole. (Now that's what I call fossil hunting!)
The finds belong to two groups of extinct marine reptiles - the plesiosaurs and the ichthyosaurs, which were the top predators living in what was then, a relatively cool, deep sea. One skeleton has been nicknamed 'The Monster' because of its enormous size.
Jorn Harald Hurum, co-director of the dig, said he was taken aback by the sheer density of fossil remains in one area. "You can't walk for more than 100m without finding a skeleton. That's amazing anywhere in the world," he told BBC News. Ichthyosaurs bore a passing resemblance to modern dolphins, but they used an upright tail fin to propel themselves through the water.
Plesiosaurs are said to resemble descriptions of Scotland's mythical Loch Ness monster. They used two sets of powerful flippers for swimming and came in two varieties - one with a small head and very long neck, and another with a large head and short neck. The short-necked varieties are known as pliosaurs. The discovery of a gigantic pliosaur, nicknamed The Monster, was one of the most remarkable discoveries of the expedition. Its skeleton has dinner-plate-sized neck vertebrae, and the lower jaw has teeth as big as bananas.
The skeleton is not yet fully excavated, but its skull is about 3m long, suggesting the body could be more than 8m from the tip of its nose to its tail. "What's amazing here is that it looks like we have a complete skeleton. No other complete pliosaur skeletons are known anywhere in the world," said Dr Hurum. The fossil hoard comprises 21 long-necked plesiosaurs, six ichthyosaurs and one short-necked plesiosaur!
To read the full article click here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5403570.stm
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