That's What I Call A Fish Tale

‘Monster’ found in Jurassic graveyard
Prehistoric, short-necked plesiosaur was as large as a bus
Reuters

Updated: 3:36 p.m. ET Oct 5, 2006
OSLO, Norway - Scientists have found a fossil of a “Monster” fishlike reptile in a 150 million-year-old Jurassic graveyard on an Arctic island off Norway.

The Norwegian researchers discovered remains of a total of 28 plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs — top marine predators when dinosaurs dominated on land — at a site on the island of Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago, about 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) from the North Pole.

“One of them was this gigantic monster, with vertebrae the size of dinner plates and teeth the size of cucumbers,” Joern Hurum, an assistant professor at the University of Oslo, told Reuters on Thursday.

“We believe the skeleton is intact and that it’s about 10 meters [33 feet] long,” he told Reuters. The pliosaur, a type of plesiosaur with a short neck and massive skull, has been dubbed “The Monster.”

The University's Natural History Museum said the reptile was "as long as a bus" with a mouth "that could swallow an adult human whole."

Such pliosaurs are known from remains in countries including Britain and Argentina, but no complete skeleton has been found, he said. The skull of the pliosaur — perhaps a distant real-life relative to Scotland’s mythical Loch Ness monster — was among the biggest on record.

Scientists would return next year to try to excavate the entire fossil, buried on a hillside.

Plesiosaurs, which swam with two sets of flippers, often preyed on smaller dolphinlike ichthyosaurs. All went extinct when the dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago.

The scientists rated the fossil graveyard “one of the most important new sites for marine reptiles to have been discovered in the last several decades”.

“It is rare to find so many fossils in the same place — carcasses are food for other animals and usually get torn apart,” Hurum said.

Hurum reckoned the reptiles had not all died at the same time in some Jurassic-era cataclysm but had died over thousands of years in the same area, then had become preserved in what was apparently a deep layer of black mud on the seabed.

At that time, the area of Spitsbergen was under water several hundred miles farther south, around the latitude of Anchorage or Oslo.

Hurum said the presenceof fossils was also an interesting pointer for geologists hunting for oil and gas deposits in the Barents Sea to the east. “A skull we found even smells of petrol,” he said.

I was thrilled to death to read this article today.  I'm going to make a copy of this and show it to everybody that I know to prove the urban legend is true.  For you see, ever since I was a little girl, I've heard people tell stories about how there are school bus-sized catfish in the Ohio River.  Of course I believed them.  Most of the stories were basically the same - the people knew someone who knew someone that was a diver and saw the school bus-sized catfish while they were diving in the Ohio River.  I've seen catfish with heads as big as a human and were three or four feet long, and it dang near scared me to death.  I can't imagine diving and seeing one as big as a bus. 

I guess this proves that such a creature did actually exist, and I guess could still exist today in the form of a catfish. I guess there's probably whales out there as big as a bus - I like to think the one that swallowed Jonah was at least as big as a school bus.  So to me, it's within the realm of possibility that school bus-sized fish are out there.  I'd like to see one for myself, though.  Not that I doubt those archeologists over in Norway - it's just something I'd like to see and be able to say that the stories are in deed true.  Of course, I'd like to see one a bus-sized catfish from the safety of a submarine.