Joern Hurum in the field, hunting for fragments of a pliosaur near Svalbard in the Arctic Circle.

Credit: AFP

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The small fragments of bone are spread out on a workbench in tiny pieces that could fit into a matchbox, betraying the size of their owner: a fearsome sea predator considered the Tyrannosaurus Rex of the oceans.

In the dingy basement of the Oslo Palaeontology Museum, a team of researchers is trying to piece together the first entire skeleton of a pliosaur, a reptile that swam the oceans 150 million years ago and was so big it could swallow a grown man in a single gulp.

Bits of pliosaur fossils have previously been found in Germany, Britain and Argentina, but never have as many been found as this summer in the Svalbard archipelago off northern Norway in the Arctic.

"It looks like the most complete one. We won't know for sure until we excavate it but it looks very promising," says Joern Hurum who led the Norwegian research team to the Svalbard, only a little more than 1,000 km from the North Pole.

Researchers at this lonely outpost of science work quickly though the summer months, and carry out their field work armed with shot-guns. Hungry polar bears can pose a large, hairy threat to an unwary fossil hunter.

The palaeontologists came upon the 'treasure trove' of fossils in August. Only the skull and a few vertebrae of the pliosaur were sticking out of the Arctic rocks in what was once the seabed, and further excavations will be carried out in August 2007 to find and, hopefully, recover the rest of the body.

Until then the paleontologists are busy reconstructing the snout of the animal they have dubbed The Monster. It is in tiny pieces but is considered to be in good shape. It measured about 10 metres in length, weighed 10 to 15 tonnes and - perhaps most importantly - had a hundred teeth, some as big as a cucumber.

"It's like a sea lion with a crocodile skull in the front but it's the size of a bus," Hurum says. "It was the top sea predator at that time so really it ate anything it liked," he said, comparing his "baby" to a Tyrannosaurus Rex, the king of dinosaurs which roamed the earth at the same time and both of which disappeared 65 million years ago.

Little is yet known about the pliosaur. How did it breathe? Why did it have four lateral flippers? Did the female lay eggs or did she give birth? Perhaps 'The Monster' will hold the answers to these questions.

What is known is that, like whales, the reptile was a land animal before becoming a sea creature.

When The Monster died, it sank to the bottom of the seabed. But when the Svalbard archipelago was formed after a collision of continental plates 40 million years ago, the underwater rocks became land. The fossils surfaced after a recent landslide.

To an untrained eye, the bone fragments are difficult to distinguish from ordinary pieces of rock.

"It's just like picking mushrooms really. You need to adjust your eyes to one special thing. When you know what you're looking for, you just find it," Hurum explains.

He and his team of paleontologists will need to muster their patience, as the puzzle they are about to reconstruct has hundreds of thousands of pieces. "It's been frozen and torn so many times that it's all broken up," he said.

The isolated nature of Svalbard means it was relatively untrammeled by passing humans. However the harsh winters could wreak havoc of the delicate bones, and the researchers have only a small window of summer time in which to unearth the remaining bones.

If they manage to find the entire skeleton, piecing it together could take five years. In the next room lies the head of an ichthyosaur, another giant reptile that resembles a dolphin, that is being put back together.

"We've already used four litres of glue on it and it needs a few more litres," he says.