Giants of the Jurassic seas were twice the size of a killer whale (U Portsmout/EarthSky.org)

Portsmouth palaeontologists have published a paper today showing a pliosaur could have grown to 14.4 metres

10 May 2023

5 min read
Palaeontology and Stratigraphy
School of the Environment, Geography, and Geosciences
Faculty of Science and Health



Over 20 years ago, the BBC’s Walking with Dinosaurs TV documentary series showed a 25-metre long Liopleurodon. This sparked heated debates over the size of this pliosaur as it was thought to have been wildly overestimated and more likely to have only reached an adult size of just over six metres long.

The speculation was set to continue, but now a chance discovery in an Oxfordshire museum has led to University of Portsmouth palaeontologists publishing a paper on a similar species potentially reaching a whopping 14.4 metres - twice the size of a killer whale.

Professor David Martill from the University of Portsmouth’s School of the Environment, Geography and Geosciences, said: “I was a consultant for the BBC’s pilot programme ‘Cruel Sea’ and I hold my hands up - I got the size of Liopleurodon horrendously wrong. I based my calculations on some fragmentary material which suggested a Liopleurodon could grow to a length of 25 metres, but the evidence was scant and it caused a lot of controversy at the time.

“The size estimate on the BBC back in 1999 was overdone, but now we have some evidence that is much more reliable after a serendipitous discovery of four enormous vertebrate.”



Note bait for scale.

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more: https://earthsky.org/earth/giant-reptile-jurassic-pliosaur-prehistoric-large-size/?mc_cid=ad127c7456&mc_eid=acc1bdc5b0
https://www.port.ac.uk/news-events-and-blogs/news/giants-of-the-jurassic-seas-were-twice-the-size-of-a-killer-whale