Sir David Attenborough on painstaking excavation of giant sea monster skull

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Transcript

00:00 It's about the discovery of the skull of an extraordinary monster of the seas, one of

00:15 the biggest predators that the world has ever seen, the pliosaur.

00:23 Here is the thing the size of a London bus, moving faster than you can imagine, a thing

00:31 of that size, with huge jaws, armed with these extraordinary teeth.

00:40 Now the skull is by far the most informative part of any skeleton, but it's also one of

00:47 the most delicate.

00:48 The problem of getting out a fossil of the head, which would be about half a tonne, half

00:55 way up a steep cliff, which itself is crumbling away, and if you drop it and break it, it

01:04 is a major catastrophe.

01:05 I mean you will have lost a lot of information.

01:08 So that's quite a part of the drama.