Scientists Find Fossil of "Monster" Reptile in Jurassic Graveyard

On the tiny Arctic island of Spitsbergen, off the coast of Norway, Norwegian researchers discovered a fossil graveyard holding a total of 28 plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs, creatures that were at the top of the marine food chain when dinosaurs walked the earth. The island, about 800 miles from the North Pole, offers archaeologists and scientists "one of the most important new sites for marine reptiles to have been discovered in the last several decades," according to the scientists who discovered it.

Joern Hurum, an assistant professor at the University of Oslo, told reporters that the most startling discovery the scientists found in the 150-million-year-old Jurassic graveyard was the fossil of a "monster" fish-like reptile. "One of them was this gigantic monster," Hurum told Reuters," with vertebrae the size of dinner plates and teeth the size of cucumbers."

The monster is a pliosaur, which is a type of plesiosaur with a short neck and massive skull. "We believe the skeleton is intact and that it's about 10 meters (33 feet) long," Hurum said. The researchers were excited to find many intact skeletons in the area. "It is rarer to find so many fossils in the same place," said Hurum. "Carcasses are food for other animals and usually get torn apart."

Hurum estimated that the reptiles had not all died at the same time in some type of cataclysmic event, but rather had died over thousands of years in the same area, and their skeletons were preserved in what was apparently a deep layer of black mud on the floor of the sea.

Pliosaurs such as the "monster" have been found in countries including Argentina and Britain, but until the discovery by the Norwegian team, no complete skeleton had been found. The skull of this fossil is among the largest ever discovered. Scientists believe the pliosaur may be a distant relative to the Loch Ness monster of Scottish folklore.

Plesiosaurs, the class of dinosaurs to which the pliosaurs belong, were marine animals that swam with two sets of flippers. They often preyed on smaller dolphin-like ichthyosaurs. All of the creatures became extinct at the same time as the dinosaurs, about 65 million years ago.

Hurum said that the discovery of the fossils may prove to be of significant interests to geologists seeking oil and gas deposits in the Barents Sea to the east of Spitsbergen. "A skull we found even smells of petrol," he said.