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Recent plesiosaur papers – a round up
So far, 2008 has seen a healthy number of new papers on plesiosaurs and a few new taxa too. Way back in February, Druckenmiller and Russell (2008a) introduced Nichollsia borealis, a plesiosaur of...
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Trinity College _Attenborosaurus_ to go on exhibit
There are several casts of fossil marine reptiles in the collection of the Geological Museum of Trinity College, Dublin. The majority of these are currently on display but the largest specimen, a cast...
View ArticleSea Dragons of Avalon – Palaeontological Association Review Seminar
Well, my flight, hotel and annual leave (!) are booked and I’m looking forward to attending the upcoming Palaeontological Association Review Seminar: Sea Dragons of Avalon, taking place next week...
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Monstertalk Podcast – The Plesiosaur Hypothesis
Monstertalk is a new sceptical podcast focussing on all things cryptozoological. The most recent episode (episode 004) delves into the idea that plesiosaurs may still be alive today, lurking in lochs...
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The name game: Plesiosaur-ia, -oidea, -idae, or -us?
Proper taxonomic names, with their formal suffixes, can be confusing at the best of times. But when they include identical prefixes their meaning is further complicated. For example, to what taxonomic...
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Whatever happened to ‘Thaumatosaurus’– the wonder reptile?
This article might be considered a bit of a cheat, as it’s mostly lifted from a section of my recent paper describing the new genus Meyerasaurus, formerly ‘Thaumatosaurus’/Rhomaleosaurus victor (Smith...
View ArticleNaming Meyerasaurus – a guest article by Marc Vincent
I’m pleased to present a guest article by journalism student Marc Vincent. The subject is the naming of Meyerasaurus, a topic that links in quite nicely with a previous post. Marc produced the article...
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Mine’s bigger than yours! The Monster of Aramberri, Predator X, and other...
During the past decade several dramatically named giant pliosaurs have hit the mainstream media, many claiming to be the biggest yet discovered. But only a trickle of peer-reviewed literature has been...
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New plesiosaurs, lots of new plesiosaurs!
There was a time when I’d leap into tippy-tappy action at the first sniff of a newly named plesiosaur. Unfortunately, I haven’t been keeping Plesiosaur Bites up to date and a few new taxa have passed...
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A new Lyme Regis pliosaur
Earlier this month I co-authored a poster at SVP 2012 describing a new pliosaur from the Sinemurian of Lyme Regis (Smith and Araújo, 2012). I was unable to attend the conference in person so my...
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Why did elasmosaurids have such a long neck?
It was once common knowledge that elasmosaurid plesiosaurs were bendy-necked beasts that swanned about near the surface, striking snake-like at slippery prey. It is now common knowledge that their...
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Investigating plesiosaur swimming using computer simulations
One of the many areas of controversy in plesiosaur palaobiology is the topic of how they swam. The question goes back almost 200 years to the 1820s when the first complete plesiosaurs were described...
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