Bones of Jurassic pliosaur found in Abingdon museum drawer
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The bones of a marine reptile, twice the size of a killer whale, are found by chance in Abingdon.
Fossilised bones from a gigantic sea creature that lived 150 million years ago have been found in a drawer in a museum.
Pliosaur remains were discovered by University of Portsmouth palaeontologists at Oxfordshire's Abingdon County Hall Museum.
The vertebrae were first found during excavations at a farm near Abingdon.
Scans on a backbone found the reptile was between 9.8m (32ft) and 14.4 (47ft) long.
Prof David Martill and PhD student Megan Jacobs unearthed the remains by chance during a visit to the museum to photograph an ichthyosaur skeleton.
Ms Jacobs said: "Dave opened the drawer and there was a huge backbone in it - it was dinner-plate sized.
"We got it out had a look and concluded it wasn't a dinosaur but a huge marine reptile."
The museum curator revealed the museum had three more vertebrae from the skeleton in storage. "They had no idea that these were ginormous [bones] for this type of animal.
"It had a mouth full of enormous banana-sized teeth - you wouldn't have wanted to go swimming in the late Jurassic seas."
Twice the size of a killer whale, Prof Martill said the fearsome animals were swimming "in the seas that covered Oxfordshire 145-152 million years ago".
He said: "They were at the top of the marine food chain and probably preyed on ichthyosaurs, long-necked plesiosaurs and maybe even smaller marine crocodiles, simply by biting them in half and taking chunks off them.
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