Last spring the University welcomed Sir David Attenborough to Southampton, to help uncover the mysteries of the pliosaur for his new BBC documentary “Attenborough and the Giant Sea monster”. The documentary, which aired in December, was a special opportunity to see the University’s facilities, talented researchers and Sir David coming together to reveal the secrets of this ancient sea reptile.
It all started with the discovery of a massive fossil near Kimmeridge Bay in Devon. The snout of an enormous creature had fallen to the beach, and the remainder of the fossil was carefully excavated from the cliff face. It was the complete skull of a pliosaur.
Sir David Attenborough said: “Pliosaurs were the biggest and most formidable hunters in the Jurassic seas, the marine equivalent, you might say of T. Rex. The skull of this one is, by itself, over two metres long and armed with massive fangs.”
The BBC approached the University for help analysing the skull, having previously collaborated to reconstruct an ichthyosaur for an earlier documentary. The University’s µ-VIS Centre and expertise in paleontological research were key in exploring the skull’s secrets in a short space of time.
In the documentary, Sir David spoke to top scientists across the UK as he attempted to unlock clues about the creature’s past – from understanding how it looked and behaved, to uncovering the strategies it used to hunt and kill its prey. His investigations lead him to the µ-VIS X-ray Imaging Centre at the University of Southampton, where scientists used their highly sophisticated scanning technology to investigate the snout section of the fossilised skull.
Associate Professor Dr Neil Gostling was excited to be involved in the project. He had been inspired to get involved in palaeontology after watching Attenborough’s “Life on Earth” in 1979. However, it wasn’t just the opportunity to meet Sir David which drew him to the project. He loves unravelling the mysteries of life hidden in fossils.
Neil is used to working on dinosaurs, having identified and described three new species in the last few years. He feels the University is a fantastic environment for his research.
“We have the best CT scanner in the country in the µ-VIS X-ray Imaging Centre. You can take an enormous sample like this and put it in the scanner and then you come out with massive amounts of data. Thankfully, we have the computer facilities to be able to analyse this data and reconstruct in in three dimensions. I’ve done this with tiny fossil embryos, half a millimetre in diameter, and now with the two-metre snout of a 150-million-year-old pliosaur.”
Neil is particularly keen to point out that it is a team effort.
“Interdisciplinary working allows me to get all of the information that’s possible out of a fossil. I’m a zoologist by training, but I work with a variety of engineers too. We can take a fossil and, through the application of various technologies, and get right inside these fossils and digitally excavate them. We can see so much about how they would have lived.”
Neil is currently writing up his finding on the pliosaur and hopes to have a paper out in the near future.