A Long Neck in a Jurassic Sea

About this drawing

First things first: an underwater plesiosaurus was not a dinosaur. It was a marine reptile that shared the planet with them. While dinosaurs ruled the land, plesiosaurs and the dolphin-shaped ichthyosaurs cruised the Jurassic seas about 190 million years ago, in shallow waters that covered much of Europe.

Its body was built for swimming. It had a broad trunk, a short tail and four big paddle-like flippers that may have worked a bit like the way sea turtles fly through the water. A long neck and small head helped it snatch fish and early squid-like animals, and it had to come up to the surface for air, just like a whale.

The first nearly complete skeleton came from the cliffs of Lyme Regis on the south coast of England, and we owe it to Mary Anning, a self-taught fossil hunter. She worked along dangerous, crumbling cliffs and earned the respect of leading scientists at a time when women weren't allowed to join their geological societies.

The find looked so bizarre that a famous naturalist suspected it might be a fake. It turned out to be real, and her discoveries helped change how people understood the history of life on Earth.

• marine reptiles
• plesiosaurus
• ocean
• jurassic