The Plesiosaur’s Neck is here! Today is the official release date for my new children’s book about Poppy Plesiosaur’s unusually long neck. My advance author copies have arrived and it looks absolutely stunning, co-author Jonathan Emmett and I are both delighted with it.
It is with much excitement that I am able to reveal the front cover of The Plesiosaur’s Neck, a new children’s picture book written by Jonathan Emmett and myself. The book, illustrated by the excellent Adam Larkum, is being published by UCLan Publishing.
Pick a random piece of plesiosaur paleoart and chances are the animal will be depicted with an arched back. A hump, almost. But did plesiosaurs really have the hump?
This arched posture can be traced back in the scientific literature to Andrews’ 1910-13 seminal works on the marine reptiles from the Oxford Clay.
All plesiosaurs have four flippers, a short body and a short tail. The skeleton below belongs to Meyerasaurus victor, one of the most complete plesiosaur specimens ever found. It shows the ventral surface (underside) of the animal (redrawn from Fraas 1910).
One of the many areas of controversy in plesiosaur palaeobiology is the topic of how they swam. The question goes back almost 200 years to the 1820s when the first complete plesiosaurs were described from the Jurassic cliffs of Lyme Regis, UK.
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.
It was once common knowledge that elasmosaurid plesiosaurs were bendy-necked beasts that swanned about near the surface, striking snake-like at slippery prey. It is now common knowledge that their necks were relatively rigid rod-like structures, the function of which remains something of a mystery.
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.
