Found this on the bbc website as i had my early morning trawl through it,..

"The Jurassic-era leviathan is one of 40 sea reptiles from a fossil "treasure trove" uncovered on the island.

Nicknamed "The Monster", the immense creature would have measured 15m (50ft) from nose to tail."

Click me

I love all this kind of stuff personally and find it a shame we cant see them alive first hand,..

Very interesting, I had not heard about this find. Kinda hard to imagine it being warm enough up there for those type of animals to thrive.

Thanks for the link Rufus. That's an interesting find.

Also, just thought I'd mention that this thread would have been better in the Paleontology & Archaeology forum.



It states in the article:

I think we're going to need a bigger boat..

Wow. Good one Bill.

If the smaller plesiosaur was about 4m in length then with the new "monster" find I wouldn't doubt such scenarios actually took place.

Sorry about the wrong board i was a bit unsure to be honest, wont happen again

I do look forward to seeing some of the other 40 reptiles found, especially the reptile they believe was the same species as "The monster"

50 feet long is hardly "the world's biggest" sea reptile...... not even close.

I believe the current record holder is not even a pliosaur but in fact, a species of enormous ichthyosaur, that is almost 70 feet long. They do not look as "scary" as the Pliosaurs or Mosasaurs, though I doubt you'd want to 'meet' a 70 foot Ichthyosaur in the water, or in a small boat.

Because of its bulky barrel shaped body, this beast may even outweight the blue whale, and technically be the "largest" in not the longest, living animal.

It's very weird.. I can find notes of the 70+ foot Ichtyosaur (for example the museum it's housed in).. and I can find the BBC article quoting the scientists involved as stating the 50 foot pliosaur is largest found marine repitle by 20+% (the next largest is still a pliosaur according to this).

Both references refer to their find as the largest marine reptile... actually the pliosaur one says it's the largest marine reptile from the dinosaur era.. perhaps this is the difference.

A fossilised "sea monster" unearthed on an Arctic island is the largest marine reptile known to science, Norwegian scientists have announced.
The 150 million-year-old specimen was found on Spitspergen, in the Arctic island chain of Svalbard, in 2006.

The Jurassic-era leviathan is one of 40 sea reptiles from a fossil "treasure trove" uncovered on the island.

Nicknamed "The Monster", the immense creature would have measured 15m (50ft) from nose to tail.

A large pliosaur was big enough to pick up a small car in its jaws and bite it in half

Richard Forrest, plesiosaur palaeontologist
And during the last field expedition, scientists discovered the remains of another so-called pliosaur which is thought to belong to the same species as The Monster - and may have been just as colossal.

The expedition's director Dr Jorn Hurum, from the University of Oslo Natural History Museum, said the Svalbard specimen is 20% larger than the previous biggest marine reptile - another massive pliosaur from Australia called Kronosaurus.

"We have carried out a search of the literature, so we now know that we have the biggest [pliosaur]. It's not just arm-waving anymore," Dr Hurum told the BBC News website.

"The flipper is 3m long with very few parts missing. On Monday, we assembled all the bones in our basement and we amazed ourselves - we had never seen it together before."

a whole lot more
It's pretty cool, there is a picture of the skelton in the article.

Wow!That thing would make jaws wet himself and swim away
BTW,I really doubt this thign could have the strongest bite of any animal.It would have a really hard time trying to get over the t-rex's milestone bite not to mention that ancient alligator's ( cant remember its name ).

yep, must be a baby plesiosaur...

I don't think you would want to go cage diving with it either: it would swallow the cage!

The Norwegians are simply liars. They would not have gotten as much publicity if it was 'just another big sea reptile".

Your sources are correct, the Ichthyosaur is MUCH bigger, and it too, "is from the age of dinosaurs".

But maybe they think Ichthyosaurs should not be considered "sea monsters" since they look like an "unscary dolphin", albeit a 70 foot long, very carnivorous 'dolphin', that could probably swallow a great white shark like a normal 'dolphin' swallows a herring.

That would have been so cool, did anyone see walking with dinosaurs a few years ago?, it had quite a lot about these!

a cousin to the blue whale perhaps?

70 ft ? i always thought this one was the biggest http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himalayasaurus

Would make a nice pet, methinks.

Not a good pet.

awesome,these are one hell of amazing creatures..................................

For a start, the ichthyosaur is not a reptile, its an amphibian/fish mix ie an anfibian that learned to never leave the sea. It did not have scaly skin. I know this because my dad is part of the research team that studies it. this makes the Monster the biggest sea reptile.

second, i cant even bring myself to quote the idiot that asked if the Monster or the Ichthyosaur was a relative of the blue whale. they were a reptile and a fish respectively. the blue whale is a MAM-MAL. It was descended from furry creatures that lived in holes and were, at the time of Jurassic, no larger than gophers. the only time that reptiles, fish, insects , mammals and birds meet in the evolutionary pyramid is at the primordial soup. much as we would like to hope that we are the top predators because we are descended from sharks, we only meet them either for lunch or at a bacterial family reunion.

Fisherman: I got one! I got one!

head emerges

Fisherman: Holy S.....

You have no idea what you are talking about. The Ichthyosaur is indeed a reptile. Every source says so. An amphibian/fish mix?

You've got to be kidding.

Yes, 70 feet. This is from the same article. It did not give the length of Himalayasaurus.

A discovery in British Columbia in the 1990s made S. popularis the smaller of the Shonisaurus species; a second species, S. sikanniensis, was discovered and has an estimated length of 21 meters (70 feet).

I thought S. sikanniensis was 23m? Or has it been downsized without my knowledge?

Well, there's only the one big one from BC. The first reports are always the over optimistic and then they shrink a bit. Still 21 meters is very impressive, and dwarves every other sea reptile. Reconstructions make it slimmer than the typical, barrel shaped Ichthy. Something like this probably preyed on smaller sea reptiles, and a 70 foot Shoni, could probably swallow whole most of the previous contenders like Mosasaur and Lipeurodon that hover around 30 feet. When they read adulthood they loose all of their teeth. They may have the same niche as the sperm whale at eat large squid, though even sperm whales sometimes swallow large sharks.

you should check on this claim, I learned that Ichthyosaurs were classed as Sauropsida AKA Reptiles... if you have some information to the contrary please post it...

Of course they are reptiles. What exactly is a "fish-amphibian mix" anyway? In fact, fully formed babies found inside their mothers is on par with modern marine mammals, that the ichthys uncannily resemble.

it's possible Pyrimids on Mars is confusing Ichthyostega (an intermediate between fish and amphibians) with Ichthyosaurs... I agree that the similarity of Ichthyosaurs with modern marine mammals is 'uncanny'...