1. Elasmosaurus was not a dinosaur. It was a plesiosaur.

2. Pliosaurs were a form of plesiosaur, a group of giant aquatic reptiles that terrorised the ocean 150m years ago, around the same time that dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

3. Richard Forrest, a plesiosaur expert, said the discovery was fortunate because pliosaur skulls were generally found crushed flat.

4. The short-necked plesiosaur was a voracious reptile often compared to the Tyrannosaurus rex of the oceans.

5. Mark Evans, a plesiosaur expert at the Leicester City Museums in Britain, said he not know enough about the Norwegian find to comment on it specifically.

6. Patrick Druckenmiller, a plesiosaur expert at the University of Alaska's Museum of the North[sentence dictionary], was a member of the expedition team that found and excavated the Arctic fossil.

7. Some speculate that it may be a plesiosaur that survived the rest of the dinosaur population.

8. But the newfound plesiosaur is thought to have been a pliosaur, and pliosaurs were different from other plesiosaurs.

9. "It's as big or bigger than the largest plesiosaur ever found, " Hurum said. "This absolutely looks like a new species, " he added.

10. In which case, it is impossible to see how the plesiosaurs could obtain sufficient quantities of food to survive.

11. Dubbed "the Monster, " it's thought to be a previously unknown species of plesiosaur .

12. For instance, the crocodile cousin was dwarfed by top ocean predators such as the short-necked plesiosaur Liopleurodon, which could grow to more than 80 feet (25 meters).

13. The lake monster, like that of Loch Ness, is supposed to be akin to a plesiosaur, a kind of a long-necked aquatic dinosaur thought to have been an herbivore.

14. Excited archaeologists discovered the Loch Ness-style creature on the beach and have spent months piecing together a giant jigsaw composed of dozens of old bones to reveal the 12ft-long plesiosaur.

15. The fact that Mr Malick's Leviathan is a beached plesiosaur will draw fire from anti-Darwinians. Though "The Tree of Life" is a Christian film, it is not for filmgoers with narrow views.