Liopleurodon ferox, L. pachydeirus
By Jack Wood on @thewoodparable
Name: Liopleurodon ferox, L. pachydeirus
Name Meaning: Smooth-sided Teeth
First Described: 1873
Described By: Sauvage
Classification: Cellular Life, Archaea, Proteoarchaeota, Eukaryota, Unikonta, Opisthokonta, Holozoa, Filozoa, Metazoa, Eumetazoa, Planulozoa, Bilatera, Nephrozoa, Deuterostomia, Chordata, Craniata, Vertebrata, Gnathostomata, Eugnathostomata, Teleostomi, Euteleostomi, Sarcopterygii, Rhipidistia, Tetrapodomorpha, Eotetrapodiformes, Elpistostegalia, Stegocephalia, Tetrapoda, Reptiliomorpha, Anthracosauria, Batrachosauria, Cotylosauria, Amniota, Sauropsida, Eureptilia, Romeriida, Diapsida, Neodiapsida, Sauria, Archosauromorpha, Pantestudines, Eosauropterygia, Pistosauroidea, Pistosauria, Plesiosauria, Pliosauroidea, Pliosauridae
Happy April Fool’s! As per tradition, I am writing an article about a non-dinosaur - specifically, the marine reptile Liopleurodon. Made famous by the landmark documentary series Walking with Dinosaurs, Liopleurodon was not really much like as shown in that series - though an important marine predator, it wasn’t… huge. In fact, it was really just around the same length, at maximum, as the modern orca, so there is that misconception shattered.
Never forget. By Slate Weasel, in the Public Domain
The reason for this misconception is primarily because the skeleton of pliosaurs like Liopleurodon are not really well known, and in fact it was difficult to estimate the size of Liopleurodon in the first place, though of course, it was a known exaggeration to portray it so large. Since the program was made, research of another pliosaur, Kronosaurus, has shown that the heads of these animals made up about one fifth of their total body length - which shows how weird their heads were, for one, but for two it allowed for the estimation of Liopleurodon’s body size based on its skull. It’s skull was, overall, about 1.51 meters in length, making its body around 6.39 meters long.
By Nobu Tamura, CC BY 2.5
Liopleurodon is known from near Boulogne-sur-Mer and Caen in France, but other fossils are known from England, Russia, and Germany. It lived about 166 to 160 ish million years ago, in the Callovian to Oxfordian ages of the Middle to Late Jurassic, though of course it may have lived longer than that. A large predatory reptile of the Jurassic seas of Europe, it would have been a powerful swimmer, using its four flippers to accelerate rapidly, ambushing prey in the seas. It may have even been a good smeller, able to locate prey easily, and then rush after it to attack it.
By Dmitry Bogdanov, CC BY 2.5 - note that the fish in the background is inaccurate
Liopleurodon was a pliosaur, a group of marine reptiles a part of the bigger group of Plesiosaurs. Though Liopleurodon had a short neck, it’s a common misconception that the difference between Pliosaurs and other Plesiosaurs is that Pliosaurs had short necks - plenty of Pliosaurs didn’t have short necks (though most did, and long heads to boot), and there are Plesiosaurs to the exclusion of Pliosaurs with short necks and long heads same as Pliosaurs. Sill, Liopleurodon was fairly typical for its group, and a common figure in its environment.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liopleurodon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plesiosauroidea
