hello we need some info on Pleisosaurs and we need it A.S.A.P and it is for a grade two class project. and do u know what color they were? and how did they protect them selves?

We don't know for sure the colour if any extinct animal - colour is never preserved in fossils. However, it would be a good guess that plesiosaurs coloration was similar to that of modern marine creatures. It is normal for marine animals to be countershaded - dark on top, grading to light underneath. This makes them less visible in water, which is always lit from above. Colours again are usually blues and greys, to match the colour of the sea. There is nothing to hide behind in the open sea, so in order for animals to hide themselves either to escape from predators, or to get close to prey, they need to match the colour of their surroundings.



One special thing about plesiosaurs is their long neck, and we don't know why they had it, or why it was so long. No modern animals have a long neck like that. One idea we have is that they had heads coloured and marked to look like fish. The plesiosaur could them sneak its head into shoal of fish without scaring them off, and start snapping them up from the middle of the shoal.



Plesiosaurs were pretty big animals, and didn't need to protect themselves except against other bigger and fiercer plesiosaurs, crocodile and mosasaurs. The biggest plesiosaurs, which we call pliosaurs, were some of the biggest meat-eating animals ever to have lived. They didn't need to protect themselves against anything! The smaller ones were probably more manoeuvrable than the big ones, and could dodge out of the way, but were often prey for the pliosaurs. The plesiosaurs I study are about 160 million years old, and come from the Lower Jurassic of England. They were often prey to larger ones, and more than half the bones we find have bite marks on them.



I hope this helps. Please let me know how well you do with your project