Two metre skull of prehistoric 'sea monster' found on UK beach

A fossil-enthusiast happened upon the well-preserved prehistoric snout while walking along a beach in Kimmeridge Bay near Dorset, UK.

Transcript

00:00 Okay. Oh wow. There you go. It's huge.

00:04 So it's got big teeth, excellent for stabbing and killing its prey. It doesn't chew its food,

00:19 it just breaks into bits and digests. Throws it back to get in there. And digests the bone and

00:24 everything. So what makes this unique is it's complete. So the lower jaws and the upper skull

00:30 are meshed together as it would be in life. To find that, I think worldwide, there's hardly

00:35 any specimen ever found to that level of detail. If they are, a lot of the bits are missing.

00:41 Whereas this, although it's slightly distorted, it's got every bone present.

00:45 [Music]

01:05 So pliosaurs aren't actually a single species. They're actually a group of animals,

01:09 just like crocodiles and dolphins are. So you actually get different kind of subspecies beneath

01:14 them. [Music]

01:21 Just found something quite extraordinary. It's the jaw of a massive pliosaur. It's enormous.

01:31 [Music]

01:49 It's one of the best fossils I've ever worked on. I'll never probably work on another one.

01:54 [Music]