Friday's Featured Film: Sea Monsters

Sea monsters are in the news: ancient ones and a contemporary "monster" captured on film about a year ago.

The latest news concerns a newly discovered fossil pliosaur -- a marine dinosaur nearly 50 feet long that, reporters have noted, had "daggar-like teeth in a mouth large enough to bite a small car."

Discovered in Norway, it's likely a Jurassic species new to science. And it's an exciting find because it demonstrates that there were large marine predators in the northern seas during the age of dinosaurs.

No video of pliosaurs to share, though here's one of several dramatic illustrations created by Tor Sponga, BT, for the Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo, Norway.

(You'll also find great photos of the paleontologists at work excavating the fossil, and illustrations comparing the pliosaur to other marine mammals --notably a blue whale and a human scuba diver.)

But I did promise video and a sea monster to boot.

If you missed the story a year ago, you can find several clips of a rarely seen frilled shark -- a living fossil from the deep sea -- that was caught near shore and that survived only a few hours at the Awashima Marine Park in Japan.

The only living members of their species, they're classified as a near threatened species on the IUCN Red List. As is true for many marine species that have little or no commercial value, when they're caught it's as bycatch in other fisheries.