- Who
- Snorre oil field Plateosaurus
- What
- 2615 metre(s)
- Where
- Norway (Snorre oil field)
- When
In February 1997, the partial remains of a Plateosaurus, dating from the Late Triassic, were unearthed by a drill in the Snorre offshore oil field in the waters off Norway in the North Sea. The fossil – part of a knucklebone – was retrieved from a depth of 2,615 metres (8,579 feet) below sea level, or 2,256 metres (7,402 feet) below the seabed. The discovery was discussed in a paper published in the Norwegian Journal of Geology in January 2006 and confirmed by The Research Council of Norway.
Plateosaurus ("Broad Lizard") was a herbivore that could group up to 9 m (30 ft) long and weigh up to 4 tonnes (4.4 tons). It lived c. 210 million years ago in the Late Triassic and has been found in various sites across Europe including France and Germany, originally in 1834 by the German chemist Johann Friedrich Engelhardt.
Although some marine reptile fossils had previously been unearthed, this was the first ever dinosaur ever documented on Norwegian territory.
The bone, along with a model of a Plateosaurus are now on display in the Natural History Museum in Oslo, Norway.
