Sir David Attenborough on painstaking excavation of giant sea monster skull

Sir David Attenborough described the painstaking process of excavating the skull of a sea monster from a steep cliff, as part of a new documentary debuting on 1 January, 2024, at 8pm.

Attenborough and the Giant Sea Monster follows the excavation of the huge skull of a pliosaur, one of the biggest carnivorous creatures the world has ever seen, from the Jurassic Coast, Dorset.

It also uses CGI to show what the giant predator, which was roughly the size of a London bus, would have looked like when it terrorised the seas in the time of the dinosaurs.

“The thing about the skull is that it’s not only by far the most informative part of the body, it is by far the most delicate too,” Sir Attenborough said.