He's not lying: Image subtly modified from an illustration on wikimedia commons
Courtesy HaplochromisAdd it to the list! Which list?

The list of things that will kill you!

And, please, don’t quibble. The nit-pickers, the brick-counters, and the penny-slicers among you Buzzketeers might point out that, since we can really only die one time, a person can’t be killed by more than one thing, and therefore making a list is silly.

To all y’all, I say, “Shut it!” A person can be technically dead for several minutes and still be brought back into this town we call Life. Or, maybe, several fatal things could happen to you at very nearly the same time, and if the final straw could even be distinguished, we might accurately say that each contributed to your final achievement of death. Example: “Was it the hypothermia, the severe electric shock, or the brain parasites that killed JGordon?” “Hmm. Well if it was the brain parasites, him digging a fork into the toaster while trapped in a meat locker couldn’t have helped.” See?

So let’s recap the list so far:

1) Brain parasites
2) Electrocution
3) Hypothermia
4) Throwing knives (accidental)
5) Throwing knives (intentional)
6) Embarrassment (via brain aneurysm)
7) Misunderstanding enema directions
8) Falling off a high tree
9) Roller coaster decapitation
10) Poisoned dates
11) Fame

And the newest item?

. . . . .

“Predator X,” a carnivorous aquatic monster with a nine-foot-long skull, and foot-long teeth! It could totally kill you dead! The only caveat is that you would have to travel back to the cretaceous period, which is still about 65 million years further than we’re currently able to time travel. But, still, once you got there, you would be bitten like crazy.

Predator X has been lurking around the lower end of this list for a while now. For the last several years, paleontologists have been excavating a huge deposit of marine fossils on the arctic island of Svalbard. (That story was covered here on Buzz, back in October of 2006.) In fact, I wrote about another monster pliosaur uncovered at the site last March (See “Something Awesome.”) But Predator X, which was discovered on the last day of that field season, is an even more monstrous pliosaur. It looks like it was around 50 feet long, and weighed in the neighborhood of 45 tons.

(Pliosaurs, just to review, are extinct aquatic reptiles, and are not to be confused with “plesiosaurs.” Plesiosaurs are those long-necked, Nessie jobbers. Pliosaurs are related to plesiosaurs, but they had short, thick necks, and huge, scary heads.)

Back when the pliosaur we call “Something Awesome” was discovered, a paleontologist made a fun superlative sort-of statement about the new creature: “It was big enough to pick up a small car in its jaws and bite it in half.” Because Predator X is slightly larger, I’m going to save that scientist some time, and go ahead and say, “It was big enough to pick up a medium-sized car in its jaws and bite it in half.”

Very impressive, Predator X. You would so be able to kill me.

Tags : pliosaur, paleontology, Svalbard, arctic, superlatives

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Something like this: But fifty feet long, and not made out of colored pencils.
Courtesy Wikimedia CommonsEvery so often I tell myself, “JGordon, this is it. That was the last time. Never again shall you poop in your pants.”

And it seems a reasonable resolution, doesn’t it? I mean, I’m pretty much a grown man, and the time has long since passed for me to leave behind those childish things. Plus, I can’t keep buying pants at that rate. So I say, “Yes, JGordon, never again shall I do that,” and I walk out of the mall with a smile on my face.

And then paleontology goes and turns me into a liar. Two awesome new theropods discovered in Africa. Resolution gone. A pterosaur with a 40-foot wingspan. Lifetime ban from the public library. Now? Solid fossil evidence of the largest sea reptile ever recorded, a pliosaur fifty feet long. I won’t say exactly where I was when the, ah, full impact of the discovery hit me, but the pastor was not happy.

Anyway, the natural history of the world is now a little bit cooler. The partial skeleton of what is most likely an uncatalogued species of pliosaur was unearthed from a spectacularly productive fossil bed on Spitspergen, an island in the Arctic Svalbard chain. Portions of the animals snout, teeth, shoulder girdle, neck and back were found, as well as a nearly complete, 10-foot long flipper, enough remains to pretty definitively set the creature’s full length at about 50 feet. Other pliosaur remains have been discovered across the world that suggest sizes approaching that of the Svalbard specimen, but those are largely composed of isolated bones, and length estimates based on them may not be accurate.

Pliosaurs were marine reptiles (and so technically not dinosaurs) that lived in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, and became extinct around the same time as the dinosaurs did. They had large, “teardrop-shaped” bodies with long paddle like flippers, and massive, tooth-filled heads. The largest of them had jaws in the neighborhood of 9 feet, putting even the huge headed tyrannosaurs to shame. Their jaw muscles even outdid those of crocodiles, some of the most powerful biters to ever exist; large pliosaurs probably had three or four times more jaw muscles of crocodiles. A pliosaur like the Svalbard specimen, a plesiosaur paleontologists claims, “was big enough to pick up a small car in its jaws and bite it in half.”

It’s statements like that that are wasting away my clothing budget.

The fossil bed that the pliosaur came from continues to yield more marine reptile remains than any other excavation, including yet another partially uncovered pliosaur that may rival its neighbor in size.

Oh man.

Tags : pliosaur, pants-ruining, marine reptiles

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Credit: Natural History Museum, University of Oslo, Norway
Artwork by Tor Sponga, BT

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