Remembering Richard Forrest
It is with great sadness that I take this personal look back at my friendship with fellow plesiosaur palaeontologist Richard Forrest. I think I first met Richard when I started to attend talks at the Leicester Literary and Philosophical Society in 2003. However, my strongest early memory of Richard is from March 2004 at a ‘Sea Monsters’ open day organised...
Monquirasaurus
Monquirasaurus is a giant pliosaurid from Colombia, South America. Originally named by Hampe (1992) as a species of Kronosaurus (K. boyacensis), the skeleton was later allocated to the new genus Monquirasaurus by Noè and Gómez-Pérez (2021). The genus name derives from ‘Monquira’, the administrative division in which the holotype was discovered. Monquirasaurus skeleton. From Hampe (1992). Monquirasaurus reconstruction. From Hampe (1992)...
The Stewartby Pliosaur and the 1967 Liopleurodon reconstruction
Newman and Tarlo (1967) In 1967, Barney Newman and Lambert Beverley Tarlo authored a three-page short article in the popular magazine ‘Animals’, a short-lived periodical published weekly by Purnell from 1963 to, at least, 1967… I’m not sure when it eventually fizzled out. Their article entitled “A Giant Marine Reptile From Bedfordshire” provides an account of plesiosaur swimming...
Macroplata
Macroplata is a rhomaleosaurid plesiosaur from the Lower Jurassic of Warwickshire, UK. Macroplata was named and briefly described by Swinton (1930a) based on a single skeleton from Harbury, Warwickshire, and the skeleton was redescribed in detail by Ketchum and Smith (2010). Photograph of Macroplata tenuiceps in situ in Harbury, Warwickshire. White (1940) referred the species Plesiosaurus longirostris to Macroplata, and...
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...
Book review: Plesiosaur Peril by Daniel Loxton
In Plesiosaur Peril, author Daniel Loxton plunges us into the Jurassic ocean, to recount a day in the life of a baby Cryptoclidus. The book is the third in Loxton’s ‘Tales of Prehistoric Life’ series, which includes the stories Ankylosaur Attack and Pterosaur Troubles. In this short children’s story we follow a juvenile Cryptoclidus and the rest of...
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. As discussed in the open access paper (take a look), the specimen is sufficiently different...
A new Lyme Regis pliosaur
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. Ricardo Araújo stands proudly next to our poster at SVP 2012....
The Planet Dinosaur plesiosaurs (part 1)
Astute viewers of BBC’s plesiosaur-fest on Planet Dinosaur this week may have spotted my name dash across the screen at the end credits. ‘Fight for Life’, the fourth in the series, was the first episode, and so far as I’m aware only episode, to plunge us into the Mesozoic oceans and introduce us to some marine life. I’ll obviously skip...
The Weymouth Bay Pliosaur
The Lottery Heritage Fund has purchased an enormous pliosaur skull from the Kimmeridge Clay of the Dorset coast. On 8th July 2011 the pliosaur hits the media again! The new Pliosaur display in the Jurassic Coast Gallery of Dorchester County Museum will be formally opened, with David Attenborough as special guest. The purchase of the skull of an enormous pliosaur...
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...
New plesiosaur replicas for 2011
A couple of new plesiosaur figures will be released in 2011, both from blossoming company CollectA. As a UK-based company CollectA has a tendency to choose British taxa, sometimes rather obscure ones. So forget Elasmosaurus or Kronosaurus, CollectA have gone out of their way to produce the first ever replica of two wonderful British Jurassic taxa: Rhomaleosaurus and Attenborosaurus. Rhomaleosaurus...
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. The quotes from myself are the result of an interview Marc conducted as part of the project. I reproduce his article here...
‘Pickstown plesiosaur’ unearthed in South Dakota
The discovery of a new plesiosaur specimen was recently announced by the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, South Dakota, USA. 11-year-old Devon Zimmerman noticed the skull and part of the backbone on the bank of the Missouri River, near Pickstown, South Dakota, during a vacation with parents Duane and DeeAnn Zimmerman of Sioux City, Iowa. They reported the...