SOUTHAMPTON, England, Dec. 28 (UPI) -- A powerful X-ray scanner is revealing secrets of the fossilized skull of a colossal marine dinosaur that lived 150 million years ago, U.K. researchers say.

Scientists at the University of Southampton are using a CT scanner to probe the inner structure of the 8-foot-long skull of a pliosaur, a creature researchers estimate was 30 feet to 50 feet long and weighed between 7 and 12 tons, the BBC reported last week.


The recently unearthed fossil skull is thought to belong to one of the biggest pliosaurs ever found.

The fossil skull is being removed from its rocky casing by researcher Scott Moore-Fay for the Dorset Country Council, which purchased the fossil from a local collector.

However, as his work reveals the surface of the fossil, a more high-tech solution was needed to probe deeper inside.

Southampton's Ian Sinclair offered the use of a new, powerful CT scanner being constructed in the school's engineering sciences department.

"When we have the situation of rare samples that are precious, like the pliosaur, we have to extract the most information from them and we certainly don't want to destroy them, so this really is the perfect tool," he said.

"At the end, you have a 3-D volume representing your original specimen," Southampton engineer Mark Mavrogordato says. "And you can slice it, dice it, however you want, as if you could dissect it with a knife, but you are doing it digitally and non-destructively."