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 a name, Thaumatodracon wiedenrothi, meaning ‘Wiedenroth’s Wonder Dragon’.
Category «Taxonomy»
Monograph on Rhomaleosaurus thorntoni
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 basis for my PhD thesis back in (time flies!) 2007.
Pliosaurus kevani – the Weymouth Bay Pliosaur
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.
New plesiosaurs, lots of new plesiosaurs!
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 swamped by the things.
Mine’s bigger than yours! The Monster of Aramberri, Predator X, and other monster pliosaurs in the media
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 fiction, and it’s easy to get the different stories muddled up, especially in the case of two identically sized congeneric pliosaur specimens from Svalbard: ‘The Monster’ and ‘Predator X’.
Naming Meyerasaurus – a guest article by Marc Vincent
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.
Whatever happened to ‘Thaumatosaurus’ – the wonder reptile?
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.
The name game: Plesiosaur-ia, -oidea, -idae, or -us?
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?