It’s official: A giant marine reptile that roamed the seas roughly 150 million years ago is a new species, researchers say. The animal, now named Pliosaurus funkei, spanned about 40 feet and had a massive 6.5-foot-long skull with a bite four times as powerful as Tyrannosaurus rex.
“They were the top predators of the sea,” said study co-author Patrick Druckenmiller, a paleontologist at the University of Alaska Museum. “They had teeth that would have made a T. rex whimper.”
Combined with other fossil finds, the newly discovered behemoth skeletons of P. funkei paint a picture of an ancient Jurassic-era ocean filled with giant predators.
In 2006, scientists unearthed two massive pliosaur skeletons in Svalbard, Norway, a string of islands halfway between Europe and the North Pole. The giant creatures, one of which was dubbed Predator X at the time, looked slightly different from other pliosaurs discovered in England and France over the last century and a half.
Now, after years of painstaking analysis of the jaw, vertebrae and forelimbs, the researchers have determined that Predator X is in fact a new species, and they have officially named it for Bjorn and May-Liss Funke, volunteers who first discovered the fossils.
The pliosaurs, marine reptiles that prowled the seas 160 million to 145 million years ago during the Jurassic period, had short necks, tear-shaped bodies and four large, paddle-shaped limbs that let them “fly through the water,” Druckenmiller told LiveScience.
The new species likely lived closer to 145 million years ago and ate plesiosaurs, related long-necked, small-headed reptiles.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/49448852/ns/technology_and_science-science/#.UH-sRWlra9U
Reference: E. M. Knutsen, P. S. Druckenmiller, and J. H. Hurum. 2012. A new species of Pliosaurus (Sauropterygia: Plesiosauria) from the Middle Volgian of central Spitsbergen, Norway. Norwegian Journal of Geology 92:235-258 (can be downloaded from http://www.geologi.no/njg/currentissue/)
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Laura K. Säilä