VERY LATEST ON GIANT PLIOSAUR

[darren.naish@port.ac.uk]

As promised, I at long last managed to have a talk with Dave Martill 
about the giant Peterborough pliosaur, a single enormous vertebra 
previously employed as a trusty doorstop [Dave has only just returned 
from an expedition to Brazil and so has been unavailable for the last 
couple of weeks]. Dave was somewhat bemused about the 
reidentification attributed to him of the specimen as a cetiosaur 
vertebra: as far as he was concerned, it was still probably from a 
pliosaur. 

To be doubly sure, we phoned Arthur Cruickshank to see if he had 
formally reidentified the bone again (Arthur previously thought the 
bone might be from a cetiosaur after all [it's original, concessioned 
identification], but later changed his mind on further examination). 
No, as far as Arthur was aware, pliosaur was still the best
identification. Arthur emphasised that his current stance on the 
specimen was esentially the same as the one published in the 
_Palaeontological Association_ abstracts volume resulting from the 
talk by McHenry et al. at Birmingham in 1997.

These latest communications date from August 2nd.

So there you go. I have noticed that whenever vertebrate 
palaeontologists start talking about big pliosaurs they, much like 
fishermen, start relating anecdotes about enormous fragments they 
have witnessed in various museums around the world. The giants are 
out there, and quite widely distributed according to the many 
anecdotes I have now heard, but exactly how giant they were is 
something else.

P.S. You should have seen the lower jaw I saw in the basement 
collection of the Dorset County Museum! It was >this< big!!!!

I'll put all this stuff on my still-developing website (eventually).

DARREN NAISH 
PALAEOBIOLOGY RESEARCH GROUP
School of Earth, Environmental & Physical Sciences
UNIVERSITY OF PORTSMOUTH
Burnaby Building
Burnaby Road                           email: darren.naish@port.ac.uk
Portsmouth UK                          tel: 01703 446718
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http://www.naish-zoology.com]