It’s the biggest jigsaw puzzle you’ve ever seen but in this case, there are no instructions on the box. Hundreds of bones are laid out on the floor and Dr Hilary Ketchum, of the Oxford Museum of Natural History, has kindly offered to piece them all together.
It takes more than an hour to slot the makeshift skeleton of Eve the plesiosaur into place. And you can clearly see the giant scale of the animal, with its large flippers and long neck, BBC reported
Plesiosaurs ruled the oceans for more than a hundred million years before dying out at the same time as the dinosaurs.
Despite their dominance of the prehistoric oceans, there are still many unanswered questions about their biology, anatomy and evolution.
Plesiosaurs are really unusual animals, says Dr Ketchum, who looks after geological specimens at the museum.
“They’re a type of reptile related to other reptiles like dinosaurs, crocodiles, ichthyosaurs and turtles for example, but actually we’re not really sure where they fit in the grand scheme of things.” The animal was spotted by a group of amateur archaeologists from a shard of bone at a quarry.
“One day, one of the members found a little bone over there from the flipper just lying on the clay,” explains Dr Ketchum, gesturing at the 165-million-year-old skeleton beside her on the floor.
“On further investigation, they found more and more bone and eventually they discovered the entire skeleton, which is very exciting.
“We think it’s possibly a new species but even if it’s not, it’s very unusual. They’re very rare fossils – plesiosaurs, especially nearly complete ones like this.” The fossil was discovered at the Must Farm quarry near Peterborough.
Mark Wildman and members of the Oxford Working Group – a team of amateur and professional archaeologists who search for fossils – nicknamed her Eve, as she was their first major find.
The true gender of the fossil is unclear, as the only confirmed female plesiosaur is a fossil found with a baby inside.
The quarry hit the Bheadlines earlier this year, when a Bronze Age settlement was unearthed.
Eve was discovered in 2014 in a much older layer of the Earth – a swathe of rock from Jurassic times which was once beneath the ocean and is known for containing fossils of marine animals such as plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs.
The Oxford Clay, as it is called, stretches across much of England, and is exposed in quarries around Oxford, Peterborough and Weymouth, where many of the fossil discoveries of Victorian times were made.
The fossil was donated by quarry owners Fonterra to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, where staff have spent months cleaning and repairing it.
