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Bathyspondylus

Name means: “deep vertebra”1

Ate: MeatPlesiosaursLate JurassicNot technically a dinosaur

Bathyspondylus was a plesiosaur, a long-necked marine reptile that swam in the Jurassic seas. It is known from just a few bones found in England, so scientists are still figuring out what it looked like. Its name means 'deep vertebra' because its backbone bones were very deep from top to bottom.1 2

Fun fact: this sea reptile swam while dinosaurs walked on land. Everyone calls them dinos, but they were a different branch of reptiles.

Lived

155 to 149 million years ago2

Late Jurassic

Fossils found in

Swindon, Wiltshire, England1 2

Food

Meat2

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

cool stuff

Fun facts

Bathyspondylus is known only from a partial skeleton found in 1774, which includes 20 chest vertebrae, 23 back vertebrae, 1 tail vertebra, and some rib and hip bones.1

Its vertebrae are very short from front to back, and their ends are flat or slightly hollow.1

The fossils show a mix of features from two different plesiosaur groups, pliosauroids and plesiosauroids, which makes it hard to classify.1

The only known species is Bathyspondylus swindoniensis, named after the town of Swindon where it was found.1

Bathyspondylus lived during the Kimmeridgian stage of the Jurassic Period, about 155 to 150 million years ago.1

The holotype skeleton was once owned by William Cunnington III before 1810, and later ended up in the Devizes Museum in England.1

AI-made picture of Bathyspondylus — An AI-made picture of how Bathyspondylus might have looked, made by a computer from what scientists know. It is a guess: the real animal may have looked different, and nobody knows its true colours.

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For dino experts

Scientific name: Bathyspondylus
Named by: Delair 19822
Group: Plesiosaurs
Family / clade: Plesiosauria2
Classification: Plesiosauria > Sauropterygia2
Age of the rocks: 155 to 149 million years (Kimmeridgian)2
Rock formations: Kimmeridge Clay2
Countries: United Kingdom2
Fossil records: 2 in the Paleobiology Database2
Discovery: Bathyspondylus was named and described in 1982 by J. B. Delair, based on a partial skeleton discovered in 1774 near Swindon, England.1 2
Still debated: Scientists are not sure which family Bathyspondylus belongs to, because its bones show a mix of features from different plesiosaur groups.1

Where the facts come from

Bathyspondylus (en.wikipedia.org)
Bathyspondylus in The Paleobiology Database (CC BY 4.0): age, places, rock formations, classification.

Every fact on this page has a number that points to its source. If we got something wrong, sorry, we are dino fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.

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