Colossal sea monster unearthed in UK BBC News

Now to the story of a sea monster with 130 razor-sharp teeth, the biting force of a T-Rex and a skull measuring two metres. It might sound like the stuff of legend, but this creature really did exist around 75 million years ago, and it was called Pliosaur. And a fossil of its enormous jaws has been now found off Dorset's Jurassic coast. Our science editor, Rebecca Morel, went for an exclusive look. Oh, wow. It's huge. Unveiling a Jurassic sea monster, this is the two-metre-long skull of a Pliosaur, one of the most fearsome predators the planet has ever seen. So it's got big teeth, excellent for stabbing and killing its prey. It doesn't chew its food, it just breaks into bits and digests the bone and everything. Steve Etches led the efforts to unearth and prepare this ancient aquatic beast. What makes this unique is it's complete. So the lower jaws and the upper skull are meshed together as it would be in life. To find that, I think worldwide, there's hardly any specimens ever found to that level of detail. If they are, a lot of the bits are missing, whereas this, although it's slightly distorted, it's got every bone present. It's one of the best fossils I've ever worked on. I'll never probably work on another one. The snout was discovered by a fossil enthusiast on a beach near Kimmeridge Bay in Dorset. I just found something quite extraordinary. It's the jaw of a massive Pliosaur. It's enormous. It must have just come out of a cliff up there somewhere. Over the course of weeks, the rest was excavated. A perilous process, with Steve and the team dangling off ropes halfway down a fast-eroding cliff face. It was all followed by a BBC documentary team and Sir David Attenborough. In these waters, underneath my feet, lurked the ultimate marine predator, the Pliosaur. This gigantic reptile lived 150 million years ago. Reaching more than 12 metres in length, its bulky body was powered through the water with huge paddle-like limbs. It would have terrorised the oceans. So what we're looking at here is a surface scan of the skull of the Pliosaur. Scientists have scanned the fossil to try and learn more about its bite, with its 130 razor-sharp teeth. They've calculated it had a bite force similar to a T-Rex. I think what we're looking at here is the top predator in the environment. You know, if this animal had a huge bite, it would have been able to eat pretty much everything else that was around in the water at that time, including some other very large animals as well. Other Pliosaurs and Plesiosaurs, Ichthyosaurs, other marine crocodilians as well, too, would all be potential prey items for this animal. The dark clay of Dorset's Kimmeridge Bay is rich in fossils. Why is that? 150 million years ago, this whole area would have been a tropical ocean. And the cliffs behind me were the mud on the seafloor where the bodies of prehistoric sea creatures were buried. And there they remained, hidden away for millions of years. It's only now, as the rocks crumble, that these fossilised skeletons are finally being revealed. The exact location where the Pliosaurs' head was found is a closely guarded secret. The team believes the rest of the skeleton is still embedded in the cliffs. I've spent my life and the rest of the animal is there, that's for sure. Really, it should come out because it's in a very rapidly eroding environment. This part of the cliff is going back by feet a year. And it won't be very long before the rest of it sort of drops out and it gets lost. So it would be advantageous to do this because the opportunity is once in a lifetime. The Pliosaur will be put on display in Dorset in the new year and it will bring scientists from all around the world to study it, to learn more about this monster of the seas and the world it lived in all those millions of years ago. Rebecca Murrell, BBC News, the Jurassic Coast in Dorset.