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What lies beneath

Hungry sea monsters once roamed the Arctic Ocean

JANE GEORGE

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Jørn Hurum and Hans Arne Nakrem from the Univ. of Oslo’s Natural History Museum found the fossilized remains of a huge sea monster on this hillside in the Svalbard Islands. (PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY, OSLO)

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About 150-million years ago, these hungry sea monsters, called plesiosaurs, roamed a much-warmer polar region – and they were capable of eating any man-sized creature in one gulp.

Fossilized plesiosaur teeth have turned up in Axel Heiberg in Nunavut’s High Arctic – but recently a field crew from the University of Oslo found what looks to be an entire skeleton of a pliosaur, a member of the plesiosaurus family, in Norway’s Svalbard Islands.

They immediately nicknamed this find “The Monster.”

Based on the fossilized remains of its skull, limbs, and backbone found eroding out of a steep hillside, the skeleton is one of the largest pliosaurs ever discovered.

This skeleton has dinner plate-sized neck vertebrae, and its overall length was at least 10 metres and it skull length probably more than two metres.

Plesiosaurs used two sets of powerful flippers to fly through the water. Some plesiosaurs possessed a small head suspended at the end of a long neck, while members of pliosaur group had short necks, but relatively massive skulls, say the palaeontologists from the University of Oslo’s Natural History Museum, Dr. Jørn Hurum and Hans Arne Nakrem, who found the dinosaurs.

They found the fossil while conducting fieldwork in the Svalbard islands, located at the same latitude as Nunavut’s High Arctic islands.

Hurum told the BBC he couldn’t walk more than 100 metres there without finding a new skeleton.

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This is an artist’s portrait of what a pliosaur looked like – check out the giant sized teeth.

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Over a two-week period, 28 new dinosaurs were found: 21 long-necked plesiosaurs, six ichthyosaurs and the one short-necked pliosaur.

The fossilized remains are also very well preserved, and most of the skeletons are articulated, that is, with the bones still lying in their original life position. Carcasses were generally food for other animals and usually got torn apart, making full dinosaur skeletons, like that of the pliosaur, a rare find.

“We are quite sure it is complete,” he told Associated Press. “We have the head, and can see about six metres of vertebrae before it disappears into the ground.”

Thick layers of black mud in the sea floor also helped to preserve the bones – and gave the fossils an oily smell.

Scientists are now racing to protect the find, so they can continue the excavation next summer.

Some claim that plesiosaurases still swim in the oceans. Japanese fishermen caught what some paleontologists determined could be plesiosaurus, off the coast of New Zealand in 1972.

But after a member of the crew had photographed and measured it, the trawler’s captain ordered the corpse to be thrown back into the sea for fear of contamination to his fish.

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