A fifth of its length
Its skull was about 1.5 metres long, with jaws full of thick, pointed teeth.
In the sea · Sea reptiles
Liopleurodon
Smooth-sided tooth · LIE-oh-PLOOR-oh-don
A powerful sea reptile with a huge head, a short neck and four big flippers.
- Size
- About 6 to 7m long
- Lived
- About 166 to 155 million years ago
- Found in
- England, France and Germany
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To scale
How big was it?
The bars are drawn to the same scale. On these pages the animals are sized in proportion to each other as far as a screen allows: the giants are shrunk a little and the smallest are enlarged, so that you can see them all.
Good to know
Six things about the liopleurodon
Top of the food chain
It was the top hunter in the seas of Jurassic Europe.
It could smell under water
Water flowed through its nostrils as it swam, so it could scent prey from a distance.
Not as big as on television
A television series showed it 25 metres long. The real animal was about a quarter of that.
A sprinter
Four big flippers gave it tremendous acceleration over a short distance.
A short-necked plesiosaur
It belongs to the pliosaurs: plesiosaurs with short necks and big heads.
The real thing
Photos of the liopleurodon
Photos are from Wikimedia Commons, used under the free licences shown. They have been resized, and cropped where they appear in link previews.
What it ate
Large fish, ichthyosaurs and other sea reptiles.
How we know
It was named in 1873 from a single tooth. Skeletons have since been found in England and France.
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