The remains of a 15 meter[1] long sea living predator has been found in Svalbard, an archipelago located about midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. The animal, a species of pliosaur dubbed Predator X by the group of scientists who discovered it, lived in the ocean 147 million years ago during the Jurassic period.

Predator X hunting (Photo: Atlantic Productions)

The skull of Predator X is twice as big as the skull of a Tyrannosaurus Rex and researchers believe the jaws of this hunter could exert a pressure of 15 tonnes[2]. The weight of the live animal is estimated to be around 45 tonnes[3].

“It is the largest sea dwelling animal ever found and as far as we know it is an entirely new species”, says palaeontologist Espen Madsen Knutsen[4] from the Olso University in Norway to Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

Knutsen is a part of the research team who dug out the skull and backbone of the creature during a two week long research expedition to Svalbard in June 2008. The remains were first discovered by Professor Jörn Hurum[5] from the Natural History Museum at Oslo University in 2007. Hurum noticed a piece of bone sticking up from the permafrost, but since it was the last day of the 2007 expedition the group was forced to leave the bone behind without any further investigation after having jotted down its GPS position.

Parts of the head and backbone was dug out during the abovementioned June 2008 expedition and together with an earlier find of a smaller specimen of the same species located just a few kilometres away, scientists have now managed to map together a good picture of what the live animal once looked like.

“We haven’t unearthed a high number of parts yet, but the parts that we do have are important ones and this has made it possible for us to create an image of what Predator X once looked like”, says Knutsen.

The digg site (Photo: Atlantic Productions)

In the excavated area, palaeontologist have found roughly 20,000 bone fragments – the remains of at least 40 different sea dwelling Jurassic animals. Once you’ve started digging in this region, it is fairly easy to spot the bones since their pale colour contrasts sharply against the black earth of the Svalbard tundra. The main difficulty is instead the short dig period and the fact that much time is spent restoring the excavated area after each dig.

“Each time we leave a dig site we have to restore the area. There can be no traces of our activities. This forces us to use half of our time digging up the same spot all over again when we return”, Kutsen explains.

Svalbard lies far north of the Arctic Circle and the average summer temperature is no more than 5°C (41°F), while the average winter temperature is a freezing −12 °C (10 °F). In Longyearbyen, the largest Svalbard settlement, the polar night lasts from October 26 to February 15. From November 12 to the end of January there is civil polar night, a continuous period without any twilight bright enough to permit outdoor activities without artificial light.

The team plans to return to Svalbard this summer to carry out more digging. They hope to find another specimen in order to make the skeleton more complete, and they also wish to unearth the remains of other animals that inhabited Svalbard at the same time as Predator X.

If you wish to learn more, you can look forward to the documentary shot by Atlantic Productions during the Svalbard excavations. The name of the documentary will be Predator X and the animal is actually named after the film, not the other way around. The film will be screened on History in the USA in May, Britain, Norway and across Europe later this year and distributed by BBC Worldwide.

Pliosaur crushing down on Plesiosaur with 33,000lb bite force (Ill.: Atlantic Productions)

All the scientific results will be published in a full scientific paper later this year.

You can find more Predator X information (in English) at the Natural History Museum, University of Oslo: http://www.nhm.uio.no/pliosaurus/english/

Two fish species, one frog species and a number of bat flies – all previously unknown to science – are believed to have been found in Guyana during the filming of a British TV series.

While working on the three-part series “Lost Land of the Jaguar” for BBC One, a team of researchers and wildlife film-makers spent six weeks exploring the rainforests of Guyana. “In a short time, we caught hundreds of species, 10% of which may be new to science. It was unreal, unbelievable,” says zoologist Dr George McGavin, one of four presenters of the documentary.

The two newfound fishes are both small creatures; one is a small banded fish belonging to the genus Hemiodus and one is a tiny parasitic “vampire” catfish that fell out of the gills of a bigger catfish. The gill dwelling fish is a member of the genus Vandellia and hence a close relative of the feared Candirú catfishes, famous for their peculiar capability of entering the human urethra. They are commonly referred to as “vampire fish” since they feed on the blood of other animals.

The scientists partaking in the expedition will now have to sit down and research all their findings more thoroughly in order find out if this is actually entirely new species, and if so, describe them scientifically and assign them scientific names. As Dr McGavin says “Catching is the easy bit, the hard bit is going back to the lab and examining the species, comparing them to collections and books – seeing if they are new to science. One hour in the field can equal hundreds of hours in the lab.”

In addition to the possibly newfound species, the documentary includes highlights like footage of the world’s heaviest snake, the Anaconda, the world’s bulkiest eagle, the American Harpy Eagle (Harpia harpyja), and the enormous Goliath spider (Theraphosa blondi) – also known as the Goliath birdeater. The film-makers have also managed to capture on film the elusive Jaguar from which the series derives its name.

BBC aired all three episodes of “Lost Land of the Jaguar” in August 2008.

You can see a film of the small banded fish here

Guyana, previously known as British Guyana, is a small nation located at the Atlantic side of southern South America. It borders to Suriname, Brazil, and Venezuela. Being slightly smaller than the state of Idaho, Guyana is the third smallest country on the South American mainland. The land can be divided into four main natural regions: a narrow strip of fertile plain along the Atlantic coast where most of the population lives, a hilly white sand belt more inland, a highland region covered in dense rainforest across the middle of the country, and a grassy savannah habitat that can be found to the south as well as in the interior highlands.

Source: news.bbc.co.uk

English fire crews were called out to aid dying fish in Northampton, BBC News reports. Members of the public noticed that fish had died in a lake in Abington Park and notified the authorities. The fire crews pumped up water from the lake and then sprayed it back in an effort to increase the oxygen content in the water.

The Environment Agency is now investigating the cause behind the incident. According to their tests, the problem was not caused by low oxygen levels and might instead be related to weather or disease. “It could have been low oxygen – although we have since found out this is not the case – it could be the hot weather or it could be disease. We don’t know at the moment.” an Environment Agency spokeswoman said to the BBC. The spokeswoman also caution against releasing aquarium fish into the wild since it can spread disease.