Skull of ancient ‘sea monster’ with dagger-like teeth discovered in England

In the spring of 2022, Philip Jacobs, an artist and fossil hunter, was walking along the Jurassic Coast in southern England when he came across a snout.

It was about two feet long, complete with teeth, and appeared to have come from an ancient ocean predator known as a pliosaur. When the crew returned days later with a drone, they discovered that the snout had fallen from a cliff towering high above the beach – embedded in the cliff was the rest of the skull.

The more than six-foot-long fossil, with its skull intact and no bones missing, is the “discovery of a lifetime,” an expert said.

“There are some unusual features in there that we haven’t seen in the previous ones that have been discovered,” Steve Etches, a paleontologist who has been collecting fossils for more than 40 years and was involved in the excavations, said by phone Monday. “And it is the most complete. So the entire skull is there, no bones are missing.”

Pliosaurs were the largest carnivorous reptiles that ever lived, Mr. Etches said, and reigned at the top of the food chain in the seas of the Jurassic period. They were probably solitary hunters that hunted plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs, other marine reptiles, he added.

“They look a bit like lions on the Serengeti,” Etches said of pliosaurs. “You get a pride of lions, but also thousands of antelopes and everything else. It is the same as the Jurassic Seas.”

The skull is preserved The Etches Collection Museum of Jurassic Marine Life in Kimmeridge, about seven miles west of the Jurassic Coast and over 100 miles southwest of London. Mr Etches said the museum was working to place the skull in a display case so it could be viewed in January.

Pliosaurs lived between 200 million and 65.5 million years ago and could grow to more than 40 feet (12 meters) in length. With extremely powerful jaws, enormous fins and dagger-like teeth, they could hunt quickly and crush prey into bite-sized pieces, said David Martill, an emeritus professor of paleobiology at the University of Portsmouth in England, who was not involved in the find. “There was nothing in the ocean that could have escaped attack,” he said.

The first pliosaur fossils were found along the Jurassic Coast around 1820, and further discoveries have expanded scientists’ knowledge of the creatures. But nothing came close to the nearly intact skull, said Dr. Martill. “First of all, it’s huge,” he added. “It is also extremely well preserved.”

The skull could provide new clues about the pliosaur, which had a nostril that allowed water to flow into its mouth, allowing it to smell and hunt prey. Scientists hope the skull will shed more light on this anatomy, and ultimately on the structure of the ecosystem in the Jurassic Seas. More details about the skull will be seen in the documentary “Attenborough and the Jurassic Sea Monster,” which airs on PBS in February.

“We want to compare that ecosystem with other ecosystems, those from the Cretaceous and even modern ones, to see if they are structured in the same way,” said Dr. Martill. The fact that some vertebrae are still attached to the skull suggests that the rest of the pliosaur may be inside the cliff, waiting to be discovered, he added.

Mr Etches is confident, but digging it up won’t be cheap: it could cost around £250,000, or about $300,000, which he hopes to raise.

“We really need to get it out,” he said, acknowledging a group of people who helped bring the discovery to light. “And they did it for the best possible reasons, for science, and so that people around the world can benefit from the information we get out of it.”