THE PLESIOSAUR

When you imagine the legendary Loch Ness monster, you probably see something that looks like a plesiosaur – a long

necked, aquatic dinosaur with four flippers and a broad, crocodile-like body. In 2017, researchers presented their findings of a 76-million-year-old plesiosaur skeleton recovered from Alberta, Canada. The river-dwelling reptile would have been about Ǵthe size of a car” – measuring between 4 and 5 metres

long when it was alive.

Large as this sounds, the plesiosaur in question was likely not even fully grown when it died, and could have grown longer still. Even so, the specimen was a small fry compared with its ocean-dwelling plesiosaur cousins, which are thought to have been up to 15 metres long, researchers said. formidable jaws. They are hermaphrodites, meaning that that have both ovarian and testicular tissues in their reproductive organs, giving them a

survival advantage in the sparsely populated deep ocean.