Liopleurodon Gets an Update

Publication Info:

Transcript:

dward O. Bartlett et al, Re-evaluating body size in the Middle Jurassic pliosaur Liopleurodon ferox Sauvage, 1873, Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology (2026). DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2026.2691149

Meet what might be the newest mosasaur species, and first mosasaur premaxilla from Japan! Mosasaurs ruled our planet's oceans at a time when the dinosaurs ruled the Cretaceous landscape.Liopleurodon ferox may be one of the world's most famous Mesozoic marine reptiles, next to animals like plesiosaurus and mosasaurus, but this new update from paleontologists might be changing the way we picture this real life sea monster!

Episode 313

Notes:

There's a lot of pliosaur update, and some of you really aren't going to like it. So, for a lot of us, our introduction to Liopleurodon was probably the 1999 Walking with Dinosaurs, especially because that kind of stuck around as its image for a long time after it came out. The 150-ton, 80-ft behemoth that ruled the Jurassic seas. It It didn't do quite so well on land, but hey, what are you going to do? Even at the time, the 82-ft length was a little bit of a stretch. It wasn't really outside of possibility, but it was either extremely rare or unlikely to be the case. With estimates since the '60s putting Liopleurodon closer to 35 ft, with later kind of extreme estimates being the 62, possibly 80-ft range. With the sizes kind of shifting a few times with the various older species of Liopleurodon getting assigned to other parts of its family tree. The remaining species of Liopleurodon is Liopleurodon ferox, and thanks to a new comprehensive analysis of its fossils, it may not look exactly how you're expecting. So, let's rip off the band-aid. It wasn't 80 ft. It wasn't 60 ft. It wasn't 35 ft. It was probably about 26 ft long, with the largest specimens having been reassigned into other groups of pliosaurs. But, that doesn't mean that its lifestyle really changed at all, because its head size hasn't changed all that much. Now, taking up about a quarter of the size of its entire body, meaning that it was still going after large prey. And it was still the largest vertebrate in its 165-million-year-old ecosystem. So, at the end of the day, has it gotten a downgrade or a nerf or whatever people want to say? But, still the same animal you loved doing the same things you'd expect. It just had a comparatively bigger head. As usual, if you want more information, here's the source.