Scientists marvel at the fossilised head of an underwater 'killing machine' from the Jurassic.

The skull of a colossal sea monster has been extracted from the cliffs of Dorset’s Jurassic Coast.

It belongs to a pliosaur, a ferocious marine reptile that terrorised the oceans about 150 million years ago.

The 2m-long fossil is one of the most complete specimens of its type ever discovered and is giving new insights into this ancient predator.

The skull will be featured in a special David Attenborough programme on BBC One on New Year’s Day.

    • @Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca
      12•1 year ago

      For a loch ness monster type creature to exist it would truly need to be supernatural.

      If there were only one it would need to be practically ageless and have survived since these creatures roamed the earth millions of years ago.

      Otherwise you’ll have to have at least two creatures in Loch Ness for the entire time to maintain a lineage throughout that time, making it twice as likely to have been discovered

      If you follow the rules of genetics the creature would likely be horribly deformed and riddled with genetic diseases if that were the case.

      To avoid that you would probably need a population of 50-100 creatures within the loch ness in order to sustain a somewhat viable population.

      It’s very unlikely that with how much attention has gone on, 50-100+ of those creatures would go undiscovered, let alone the sustenance needed to sustain that size of population.

      So no, unless it’s a single supernatural creature it’s pretty much impossible I would say.

    • @funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
      4•1 year ago

      I mean, if it’s too big to swim out of the Dochgarrot lock then it’d be easy to detect. If it isn’t then what’s keeping it in the lake instead of swimming out past Inverness and out into the Moray Firth?

      • @Everythingispenguins@lemmy.world
        6•1 year ago

        It doesn’t like Inverness it made the mistake of walking though the Ferry. After that straight back to the lock and never to the big city again. Plus it found Inverness Castle not that interesting.