PLESIOSAURUS FOUND

Alexandra Herald and Central Otago Gazette, Issue 1630, 11 April 1928, Page 3

PLESIOSAURUS FOUND

TREASURE. OF ENGLISH QUARRY The skeleton of a plesio%auius lias ju# Loen unearthed in the Ked Triangle quarries at Harbury, Warwickshire, which isth« property of a cement combine. The find i> to be placed in the natural history section (South Kensington) of the British Museum, beside the skeleton of an ichthyosaurus which was discovered in a ncar-bv quarry in 18S8. W. K. Sainton, of the department of geology at the Natural History Museum, is now examining the new-found fossil, anil estimate:- its age at" between 100,000.000 and 200.W3.000 years. Discussing it. he said: "The Ked Triangle plesiosaurus is a raie example in that the head was attached. Generally the head is missing from such tinrb-. One theory is that roving dinosaurs, who were carnivorous but rather stupid hunters, used to eat dead 01 dying saurian? they found, and general!} detached and lost t lie heads. "The plesiosauru-V head is triangular, and has a thiyj eye on top of the skull. The veslise of this remains in man in the fonr of the pineal gland. When this fossil wife •*ound the head was stained red. So we' preserved U the fossil that it has all it teeth It is 16ft long, the length of thremen. 'au unusual size, for the niajoritfcund have been as little as 6ft- long. " The plesiosauros, which belongs to thf lizard family, livedon fish. Tt has a !on< neck, short tail, and four :paddles. Tki specimen, which wa% dug out of a bed •■ lower has clay, was lying on its siomach It may have died when England was at th bottom of tho. sea' of when it formed, a ses! shore on which the!reptile crawled out to die. The ichthyosaurus lived about the sanxperiod. so it i; possible that the two beasts met in life."

Mr Oliver Piper, chairman of the Portland Cement Selling and Distributing Company, said the first workman to strike a piece of bone with his p lc k thought he had struck —things worth talking about. They rock. He dug round it, and was startled to tmd an enormous knuckle bone, the size of a man s fist. When quarry officials were called, it was thought at first that traces * y ,me ha ? >**" found- Later the board of directors hd to decide what should be 2£2L2? tt *?"* " white ele P"ant" which had ££¥? U £ m an J extr emefy valuable bed of deposit. It was decided that they would be rendering a service to science by laying bare the great skeleton with every care.