Liopleurodon
Name means “Smooth-sided teeth”
🚫 Not a dinosaur!
Liopleurodon was a pliosaur, a short-necked kind of plesiosaur that lived in the sea. Dinosaurs were land animals with legs held straight under the body, and plesiosaurs are a separate branch of reptiles.
Liopleurodon was a big sea reptile with a huge head, strong jaws and four flippers. It was a top hunter in Jurassic seas, but it was not a dinosaur!
Liopleurodon was a pliosaurid from the Middle Jurassic (Callovian) seas of Europe and a top predator of its time. Well-studied specimens from the Oxford Clay suggest adults typically reached about 5–7 m, with a skull over a metre long.
Ejemplares de un Liopleurodon ferox, un Carcharocl — Suki3464 · CC BY-SA 4.0
Pictures
Spin it in 3D
3D model description: a smooth, rounded model of Liopleurodon built from the DinoVerse illustration, showing its overall body shape and proportions. It is not a scan of a real fossil.
About this model
This is a simplified body-shape model, sized to the real animal's length (about 6.0 m). In AR it appears life-size!
It looks best from the side, like the painting it comes from. It is not a fossil scan — museums such as the Smithsonian 3D collection share real fossil scans you can explore.
What might it sound like?
Transcript: Deep, rumbling groan rolling through the water
🤔 Nobody knows exactly how dinosaurs sounded
This is a scientific guess. We do not know if plesiosaurs made sounds at all. Modern air-breathing sea animals like whales use low sounds that travel far underwater, so this sound borrows from them.
Voice boxes and soft tissue almost never fossilise, so sound reconstructions use clues: body size (bigger animals make lower sounds), the calls of living relatives (crocodiles boom with closed mouths; birds coo and hiss), and hollow structures such as hadrosaur crests that could have worked like a trumpet.
Sound: synthesised by DinoVerse from these scientific ideas (CC0). It is a creative guess, not a recording.
Food and habits
Carnivore
Meat-eater
How it ate
Ambushed large prey with a burst of speed from its four powerful flippers, gripping with long, cone-shaped teeth at the front of its huge jaws and tearing chunks off.
🔍 How do we know?
- large cone-shaped teeth
- powerful jaw muscle attachments
- bite marks on bones of marine reptiles
It ate…
- fish
- squid-like cephalopods
- ichthyosaurs
- smaller plesiosaurs
- marine crocodiles
Liopleurodon
…and was eaten by
👑 Probably nothing, once fully grown — a top predator or too big to tackle!
Arrows show energy moving up the food chain: from food to eater.
Watch it swim
Quick facts
| 📏 Length | 5–7 m (16–23 ft) |
|---|---|
| ↕️ Height | 1–1.5 m (3–5 ft) |
| ⚖️ Weight | 1,000–1,700 kg (2,200–3,750 lb) |
| ⏳ When it lived | 166–162 million years ago (Middle Jurassic) |
| 📍 Fossils found | Oxford Clay, Peterborough, England; Boulogne-sur-Mer, France; Northern Germany |
| 🔎 Discovered | 1873 by Henri-Émile Sauvage |
| 🧬 Group | Plesiosaurs — Diapsida › Sauropterygia › Plesiosauria |
Where scientists disagree, we show a range. Sizes are for adults.
How big was it?
Where and when
- 📍 Oxford Clay, Peterborough, England (Europe)
- 📍 Boulogne-sur-Mer, France (Europe)
- 📍 Northern Germany (Europe)
Lived 166–162 million years ago
That's about 164 million years before you were born! Humans have only existed for about 0.3 million years.
See it on the big timeline →Did you know?
- 1Liopleurodon's head was more than a metre long — longer than a baseball bat!
- 2It swam with four flippers, flapping them like underwater wings.
- 3It probably ate fish, squid and even other sea reptiles.
- 4TV once said it was 25 metres long, but scientists now think it was about the size of a killer whale or smaller.
- Size estimates of 15–25 m once popularised on television came from scaling up isolated or misidentified bones; specimens of L. ferox suggest a typical length of around 6 m.
- Its internal nostrils sat in front of its external ones; one hypothesis is that water flowed through them so it could 'smell' underwater in stereo, but this idea is still debated.
- Studies of four-flipper swimming suggest pliosaurs used their flippers for powerful bursts rather than long-distance cruising, fitting an ambush-hunting lifestyle.
- Bones of other marine reptiles from the Oxford Clay show bite marks consistent with large pliosaurs like Liopleurodon.
Myth vs fact
❌ MythLiopleurodon was 25 metres long — the biggest predator ever.
✅ FactThat figure was exaggerated on TV; most scientists estimate adults at about 5–7 m long.
❌ MythLiopleurodon was a sea dinosaur.
✅ FactIt was a pliosaur, a kind of plesiosaur — a marine reptile, not a dinosaur.
Mini quiz
1. Is Liopleurodon a dinosaur?
2. How did Liopleurodon swim?
3. About how long was Liopleurodon really?
Related animals
Not a dinosaurElasmosaurus
PlesiosaurLate CretaceousPiscivore
Not a dinosaurIchthyosaurus
IchthyosaurEarly JurassicPiscivore
Not a dinosaurMosasaurus
MosasaurLate CretaceousCarnivore
Sources
Media on this page
- Ejemplares de un Liopleurodon ferox, un Carcharocles megalodon y un Livyatan melvillei de abajo hacia arriba respectivamente.jpg — Suki3464 · CC BY-SA 4.0
- Underwater light (generated background) — DinoVerse (original artwork) · CC0 1.0
- Liopleurodon simplified 3D model — DinoVerse (generated from original artwork) · CC0 1.0
- Liopleurodon reconstructed call (synthesised) — DinoVerse (synthesised) · CC0 1.0
- Liopleurodon Skull Dorsal View - Extracted.png — G. M. Woodward, in publication by Charles William Andrews · Public domain
- Liopleurodon after Tarlo.jpg — DiBgd · CC BY-SA 4.0
- Liopleurodon ferox Tubingen 2.JPG — Ghedoghedo · CC BY-SA 3.0
- Liopleurodon ferox skull reconstruction.png — Eotyrannu5 · CC BY-SA 4.0