When Monsters Ruled the Seas: The Prehistoric Creatures That Lived Beneath the Waves

Long before whales ruled the open ocean, the prehistoric seas belonged to creatures unlike anything alive today.

Ichthyosaurs raced through the water with streamlined bodies and powerful tails. Four-flippered plesiosaurs hunted beneath the waves, while enormous pliosaurs carried some of the strongest jaws in the Jurassic seas. Later, mosasaurs rose from lizard-like ancestors to become the dominant marine predators of the Late Cretaceous. Around them lived spiral-shelled ammonites, ancient sharks and giant fish-some longer than a bus.

But these extraordinary animals were not dinosaurs.

When Monsters Ruled the Seas takes readers on an evidence-based journey through more than 180 million years of changing oceans. Discover how land-dwelling reptiles returned to the water, why unrelated swimmers evolved similar shapes, how ichthyosaurs gave birth in the open sea and how palaeontologists reconstruct entire vanished ecosystems from bones, teeth, stomach contents and traces preserved in stone.

The journey follows the recovery from the greatest mass extinction in Earth's history, the rise of the first marine reptiles, the flourishing of Jurassic ocean life and the dramatic changes that produced the mosasaurs. It ends with the asteroid impact that destroyed the final great marine reptiles and transformed ocean life forever.

Serious, vivid and accessible, this book separates scientific evidence from speculation while correcting familiar myths about prehistoric sea creatures. It reveals not a world of imaginary monsters, but a succession of complex ecosystems filled with real animals whose remarkable history can still be read in the rocks.