In 2012 I co-presented a poster at the SVP annual meeting on a new plesiosaur from Lyme Regis, UK (see my article about it here). The long awaited follow up paper was finally published this summer in the latest volume of Palaeontographica A (Smith and Araújo 2017) and the beast now has…
Many readers will be familiar with the giant plesiosaur on display in the marine reptiles gallery of the Natural History Museum, London. This is a cast of the 7 metre long holotype of Rhomaleosaurus cramptoni, the original of which is housed in the National Museum of Ireland (Natural History) and formed the…
I've been rather quiet again recently, however, as coauthor of an article just published in PLOS ONE, I've good reason to come out of my shell today. The new paper describes and names the Weymouth Bay Pliosaur, a spectacular almost complete skull over 2m long. As discussed in the open access paper…
There was a time when I'd leap into tippy-tappy action at the first sniff of a newly named plesiosaur. Unfortunately, I haven't been keeping Plesiosaur Bites up to date and a few new taxa have passed me by. Of course, when I say "a few", what I really mean is we are…
During the past decade several dramatically named giant pliosaurs have hit the mainstream media, many claiming to be the biggest yet discovered. But only a trickle of peer-reviewed literature has been published to accompany these news stories. The lack of published data makes it really difficult to sift the facts from the…
I'm pleased to present a guest article by journalism student Marc Vincent. The subject is the naming of Meyerasaurus, a topic that links in quite nicely with a previous post. Marc produced the article for his university course. The quotes from myself are the result of an interview Marc conducted as part…
This article might be considered a bit of a cheat, as it's mostly lifted from a section of my recent paper describing the new genus Meyerasaurus, formerly 'Thaumatosaurus'/Rhomaleosaurus victor (Smith and Vincent 2010). However, I think the topic is interesting and might be appreciated by a wider audience. Especially those who think,…
Proper taxonomic names, with formal suffixes, can be confusing at the best of times. But when they include identical prefixes their meaning can be further complicated. For example, to what taxonomic group does the colloquial term 'plesiosaur' refer: Plesiosauria, Plesiosauroidea, Plesiosauridae, or Plesiosaurus? With all these similar sounding names it is not surprising that laypersons and specialists…
The most recent issue of the ‘Palaeontology’ (Vol 49, Part 3) features an article by Franziska Grossman on the plesiosauroids from the Jurassic Posidonia Shale in Germany. Grossman describes the skulls of two genera, Seeleyosaurus guilelmiimperatoris (a tongue-twister of a taxon! - formerly Plesiosaurus guilelmiimperatoris) and introduces a new genus Hydrorion brachypterygius…
The second paper in the two-part report on by Albright et al. on plesiosaurs from the Upper Cretaceous Tropic Shale of southern Utah (Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology, Volume 27(1) p. 41-58), introduces two new genera and species of polycotylid plesiosaur and contributes to the systematics of polycotylid plesiosaurs. The first new genus…