Jurassic Coast monster found in Dorset

Description:

An enormous ferocious, meat-eating dinosaur, which makes the T Rex no more than a snack, has been discovered on Dorset’s famous Jurassic coast.

 

So far, only the gargantuan fossilised skull of the 150-million-year-old Pliosaur has been unearthed, but seeing as that measures a mighty 2.4m long (about the same as your average car), experts are already calculating that the entire beast could measure up to 16m (about the length of a railway carriage), making it the biggest example of the species ever found and beating by far The Monster and Predator X, two 15m skeletons uncovered in Svalbad, Norway in March this year.

 

The Pliosaur was a type of Plesiosaur, the group of giant aquatic dinosaurs that dominated the seas around that time, and was a voracious hunter, terrorising the oceans and feeding on creatures such as the dolphin-like ichthyosaur and even fellow plesiosaurs, using razor-sharp teeth and massive neck muscles to tear them apart, which, according to Dr David Martell, a palaeontologist from the University of Portsmouth would have been a bit of a bloodbath.

 

The fossil’s exact coastal location is being kept a closely-guarded secret to avoid fossil hunters rampaging over the site, but it was found by a local collector who fortuitously happened to be walking along the coast on a day a large piece of the cliff came away, exposing the first clue that they were, quite literally, onto something big.

Dorset County Council have purchased the bones using money from the Heritage Lottery Fund and, once it has been completely unearthed, scientifically analysed and prepared, they plan to put it on public display in the Dorset County Museum.