T-Rex of the oceans rises up out of time

0 Comments | AFP, October, 2006

OSLO (AFP) — The small fragments of bone are spread out on a workbench in tiny pieces that could fit into a matchbox, betraying the size of their owner: a fearsome sea predator considered the Tyrannosaurus Rex of the oceans. In the dingy basement of the Oslo Paleontology Museum, a team of researchers is trying to piece together the first entire skeleton of a pliosaur, a reptile that swam the oceans 150 million years ago and was so big it could swallow a grown man in a single gulp.

Bits of pliosaur fossils have previously been found in Germany, Britain and Argentina, but never have as many been found as this summer in the Svalbard archipelago off northern Norway in the Arctic. "It looks like the most complete one. We won't know for sure until we excavate it but it looks very...