The Plesiosaur Project - from discovery to display

an amazing discovery | the outback today | Coober Pedy - back to the Cretaceous |
The Addyman Plesiosaur - a national treasure | The Plesiosaur Puzzle |
Plesiosaur Birthing Ground | Skin Deep - making the plesiosaur model

Plesiosaur Birthing Ground

One of the more surprising discoveries is that most of the plesiosaurs found in South Australia are in fact juveniles.

Ben Kear said, "About 95 per cent of the fossils we find are juveniles or babies. That's a staggering amount considering that baby plesiosaur fossils are basically unknown.

What this means is South Australia was possibly a birthing ground."

"Plesiosaurs could have come to South Australia seasonally to breed, give birth to their young and migrate north again, like whales do today.''

Plesiosaurs may have been attracted to the colder waters because they would have been teeming with plankton, small fish and squid.

Plesiosaur and ichthyosaur swimming with babies in the Eromanga Sea. (Image courtesy of Australian Geographic.)

This fossilised skeleton of a baby plesiosaur was discovered at Andamooka and is approximately 120 million years old. It was purchased by the Museum in 1967.

This tiny specimen may be related to the small (approximately 3m) freshwater/estuarine plesiosaur Leptocleidus. As a juvenile, we cannot give it a species name because diagnostic features change as they grow. Therefore it should be referred to as Leptocleidus sp. indet. (sp. indet. = species indeterminate).

The material is a partial skeleton comprising bits of the skull, a nearly complete neck, partial pectoral and pelvic girdles and a nearly complete humerus and femur. The fossil was purchased by the Museum in 1967 and comes from the Aptian Stage of the Lower Cretaceous Bulldog Shale.