Earlier this month I co-authored a poster at SVP 2012 describing a new pliosaur from the Sinemurian of Lyme Regis (Smith and Araújo 2012). I was unable to attend the conference in person so my collaborator and friend Ricardo Araujo was on hand to present our preliminary findings.
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.
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’.
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.
