A skull and more than 600 bone fragments discovered at a quarry in the UK likely belong to a new species of plesiosaur: a “sea monster” from the Jurassic period that has anatomical features previously found only in creatures half her size, archaeologists revealed Friday.
According to BBC News and the Daily Mail, the remains were discovered at Must Farm quarry near Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire by researchers at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and belonged to a creature that was 18 feet long and lived 165 million years ago.
The specimen has been nicknamed “Eve,” Dr. Carl Harrington and his colleagues told the British media outlets. They are currently analyzing the fossils, which required 400-plus hours of work to clean and repair, to determine whether or not it represents a new plesiosaur species.
Plesiosaurs, sea creatures which lived alongside the dinosaurs, typically ranged in size from 6.5 feet (2 meters) to 50 feet (15 meters) and had extremely long necks with more than 10 times the number of vertebrae as most mammals. The Oxford archaeologists have estimated that this newfound creature weighed approximately 660 pounds (300 kilograms).
Fossils were found on the site of ‘Britain’s Pompeii’
Dr. Harrington and his colleagues told BBC News that the creature’s “snout” was the first thing that they spotted while digging in the wet clay at the Must Farm quarry, an archaeologically rich tract of land owned by the Forterra manufacturing company.
In fact, the area is also home to the remains of a Bronze Age settlement so well preserved that it has become known as “Britain’s Pompeii.” While hundreds of the creature’s bones have already been excavated, the skull still has yet to be removed from a block of clay and examined. Experts have conducted a CT scan on the block, however, to locate the bones within.
Dr. Harrington called findings the plesiosaur remains “one of those absolute ‘wow’ moments,” adding that he had “never seen so much bone in one spot in a quarry.” The specimen is believed to have had an 8 foot (2.5 meter) long beck, a barrel-shaped body, four flippers and a short tail. However, the hind flippers and part of the fore-flippers have yet to be found, according to BBC News.
Brian Chapman, head of land and mineral resources at Forterra, said that they were “thrilled that such a rare and important prehistoric specimen was unearthed at our Must Farm quarry,” telling the Daily Mail that the firm was “happy to be able to donate it to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, where it will be studied by leading paleontologists.”
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Image credit: Thinkstock
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