Celebrities from the Past - Predator X

A recreation of Predator X's jaws - Image from NY Times

I keep reading so many news items about discoveries of fossils that tell a lot about the evolution of animals today that I thought I must begin a new feature that tells these tales. Am not particularly a science freak so I won’t be giving the geeky specs. I will only be giving the news from an interesting angle and keep it short, just enough for us to know that something interesting has been found! Here is the first post of the section.

Can you imagine something with jaws big enough to make snack of a 4x4? Well, scientists have unearthed the fossil of a creature currently named as “Predator X”, in Svalbard, a remote Arctic archipelago. The marine reptile measures a scary 15 meters (50 ft) and roamed the oceans around 145 million years ago according to the team of Norwegian scientists who discovered it. They are thought to belong to group of large, short-necked reptiles known as pliosaurs, which lived during the time of dinosaurs. Expedition leader Jorn Harald Hurum, from the University of Oslo's Natural History Museum has said that the Predator X could easily have chomped up a Hummer. Wow, now that is a huge lunch.

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