So, time for more Planet Dinosaur plesiosaurs… In part 1 of we familiarised ourselves with the taxonomy and appearance of the plesiosaurian stars of the fourth episode of the BBC’s Planet Dinosaur, ‘Fight for Life’. Now we’re all set up to pick apart, with ruthless abandon, the animators’ painstaking efforts to bring these animals to life.
An exciting new paper published this week in the journal Science (Vol. 333, p.870-873) provides the first direct evidence for live birth in plesiosaurs, and may have implications for plesiosaur behaviour (O’Keefe and Chiappe 2011).
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’.
As if running a blog dedicated to plesiosaurs isn’t geeky enough, I admit to being a toy collector as well. It isn’t a secret that I run a second website (dinotoyblog.com) (and forum) dedicated to dinosaur figures, and since launching that site it has become apparent that there is a surprisingly large community of dinosaur toy collectors.