It flew under water
It beat its four flippers up and down like wings, as penguins and turtles do.
In the sea · Sea reptiles
Plesiosaurus
Near to lizard · PLEE-see-oh-SORE-us
A sea reptile with a small head, a long neck, a broad body, four long flippers and a short tail.
- Size
- About 3.5m long
- Lived
- About 200 to 190 million years ago
- Found in
- Dorset, England
Rows after you on four flippers. Move your pointer and see.
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 plesiosaurus
Called a fake
When Mary Anning found the first one in 1823, a famous French scientist said that no animal could have such a neck. He later admitted she was right.
About forty neck bones
We have seven. A giraffe also has seven.
A cage of teeth
Its long, thin teeth meshed together like a trap for fish.
It swallowed stones
Smooth pebbles are found in the stomachs of plesiosaurs, perhaps to help grind food or to trim their balance.
The model for a monster
The Loch Ness Monster is always pictured as a plesiosaur.
The real thing
Photos of the plesiosaurus
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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
Fish, squid and other small sea animals.
How we know
Complete skeletons from Lyme Regis are in the Natural History Museum in London.
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