A four-metre-long plesiosaur skeleton has been discovered by in Northern Germany by an amateur palaeontologist. 19-year-old fossil collector Sönke Simonsen discovered the specimen in June whilst looking for fossils with his dad in a quarry at Tongrube in Kreis Hoxter, near Bielefeld. “The first thing I discovered was a caudal-vertebra” said Simonsen,…
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 long neck of the plesiosaur is a mysterious adaptation for which many hypotheses have been proposed. The most recent suggestion comes from Dr Leslie Noè of the University of Cambridge . After examining the neck vertebrae of the long-necked plesiosaur Muraenosaurus, whose name translates as 'Moray eel lizard', Dr Noè concluded…