A fossil-enthusiast happened upon the well-preserved prehistoric snout while walking along a beach in Kimmeridge Bay near Dorset, UK.
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00:00 Okay. Oh wow. There you go. It's huge.
00:04 So it's got big teeth, excellent for stabbing and killing its prey. It doesn't chew its food,
00:19 it just breaks into bits and digests. Throws it back to get in there. And digests the bone and
00:24 everything. So what makes this unique is it's complete. So the lower jaws and the upper skull
00:30 are meshed together as it would be in life. To find that, I think worldwide, there's hardly
00:35 any specimen ever found to that level of detail. If they are, a lot of the bits are missing.
00:41 Whereas this, although it's slightly distorted, it's got every bone present.
00:45 [Music]
01:05 So pliosaurs aren't actually a single species. They're actually a group of animals,
01:09 just like crocodiles and dolphins are. So you actually get different kind of subspecies beneath
01:14 them. [Music]
01:21 Just found something quite extraordinary. It's the jaw of a massive pliosaur. It's enormous.
01:31 [Music]
01:49 It's one of the best fossils I've ever worked on. I'll never probably work on another one.
01:54 [Music]