Sea monsters are in stone coffins for 170 million years

The Scottish National Museum publishes the fossil of a dolphin-like sea monster shaped like a dolphin with a long, sharp-toothed mouth buried in a stone coffin.

ABC.net.au reported yesterday, experts from the Scottish National Museum have successfully extracted fossils of a giant deep-sea assassin with a stout body, about 4 meters long and has a long mouth with hundreds sharp teeth from a large ancient stone block.

"This fossil is amazing," said paleontologist Steve Brusatte of the University of Edinburgh School of Geology, Scotland, who took the 170 million-year-old fossil from the rock.

Graphic representation of fish lizards under the Jurassic ocean.(Photo: AFP).

Dubbed Monster Lake Loch Storr , the fossil skeleton encased in a rock was discovered by an amateur archaeologist at the beach on the Skye Islands 50 years ago and returned to the Scottish National Museum. This is a reptile belonging to the fish lizard family , also known as the "dragonfish" , which is destroyed before dinosaurs and replaced by dolphins and whales.

"The museum preserves the fossil carefully for half a century, but is not specialized enough to separate it from the surrounding thick rock and study it , " Brusatte said. "But we have that ability and we found this skeleton to be the most complete marine reptile fossil ever seen in Scotland."

Earlier this year, researchers found global warming wiped out lizard fish after 157 million years of domination of the ocean. According to Brusatte, the animal is more impressive than the Loch Ness monster."People don't realize that sea monsters ever really existed. They're bigger, more frightening and more interesting than Loch Ness lake monster legend. New fossils are one of them. It used to live in Scotland. 170 million years ago, " Brusatte said.

Complete fish lizard fossils will help scientists better understand the time of domination and the sudden extinction of this animal.