Plesiosaur

Hello! My name is Plesiosaur, and I have a story to tell you from a time long, long ago. You might look at me and think I was a dinosaur, but I’m not! I was a marine reptile, and I lived in the ocean while dinosaurs walked on the land. My home was the warm, shallow seas of the Jurassic Period. My body was perfectly made for the water. I had a round, sturdy body and an incredibly long, flexible neck. Instead of legs, I had four powerful flippers. I didn’t use them to paddle like a dog. Instead, I used them to ‘fly’ through the water! If you’ve ever seen a sea turtle or a penguin flapping its wings to glide through the ocean, that’s exactly what I did. With powerful strokes of my flippers, I could soar through the currents, twisting and turning with amazing grace. While dinosaurs ruled the land, I was one of the graceful swimmers that ruled the sea.

Even though I lived my whole life in the water, I was a reptile, which meant I needed to breathe air. A few times every hour, I would swim toward the sunny surface, poke my head out of the waves, and take a big gulp of fresh air. Then I would dive back down into my underwater world. My long neck was also my best hunting tool. I loved to eat tasty fish and squid-like creatures called belemnites. I could hide my big body among the seaweed or rocks and then use my long neck to reach out and snatch a quick meal before it even saw me coming. For many years, humans who studied my fossils thought I must have crawled onto land to lay eggs, like sea turtles do. It seemed like a mystery. But in 1987, a scientist found a fossil of one of my relatives with the tiny skeleton of a baby still inside her. This incredible discovery proved a secret we had kept for millions of years: we gave birth to a single, large baby right in the water. We never had to leave our ocean home.

For millions of years after I lived, my story was completely hidden in layers of stone. Then, people began to uncover clues about my life. Scientists first gave my kind a name in 1821. They called us Plesiosaur, which means ‘near to lizard,’ because they could tell from our bones that we were reptiles, but not quite like any lizard living today. Just two years later, in 1823, a brilliant fossil hunter named Mary Anning made a discovery that showed the world who I really was. On the seaside cliffs of Lyme Regis, England, she uncovered the first nearly complete skeleton of a Plesiosaur. Before her discovery, people had only found a few bones here and there and couldn't figure out how they fit together. Mary’s fossil showed my long neck, my round body, and all four of my flippers for the very first time. Her careful work helped scientists create an accurate picture of me, and it felt as if she had opened a window into the prehistoric seas for the whole world to look through.

My family of plesiosaurs swam the oceans for an incredibly long time. We first appeared in the late Triassic Period and survived all the way to the end of the Cretaceous Period, watching the world change for millions of years. But around 66 million years ago, a massive change happened on Earth that led to the end of my kind, along with the dinosaurs on land. Our time in the oceans was over. I lived in the Mesozoic Era. Though my kind no longer glides through the oceans, our fossils are like storybooks made of stone. When you see my skeleton in a museum, you're looking back in time, remembering the graceful reptile that flew through an ancient underwater world.