The Scunthorpe Pliosaur was discovered in a North Lincolnshire quarry in October 2017 by Darren Withers during a Stamford and District Geological Society field trip. CEMEX had granted the group quarry access for just 4 hours. After spending time looking at the quarry floor, Darren investigated stepped banks in the quarry side, following a trail of small ammonites until they petered out after about 30 metres — and that’s when everything changed.
In Darren’s own words: “I’m so glad I did because the next thing I was looking down at was a large vertebra.”
He said: “We only had a small time scale of four hours to dig but kept finding piece after piece, and realised how fantastic the find was.” The subsequent excavation by the Stamford and District Geological Society spanned a six-month period.
The specimen would have been a creature over 8 metres long and 4 metres wide. Various parts of this creature were found among clay and limestone, including 29 vertebrae, a tooth, 14 ribs, a humerus and small bones from the tip of the upper jaw.
Pliosaurs had an enormously powerful bite, perhaps the most powerful bite of any vertebrate, a complex system of sensory organs in their snouts, superb eyesight and the ability to taste water as they swam to help locate prey.
The animal’s bones reveal that after death, it may have laid on the seabed for up to 100 years before being covered, with oysters making the vertebrae their home and evidence that some bones had been turned over.
The museum’s collection houses a number of specimens of other marine reptiles, but as top predators are much less common than their prey, there is only a handful of pliosaurs that have been unearthed around the world. The fossilised remains are now on display at the North Lincolnshire Museum
A 155-million-year-old sea monster was found in a quarry.
