Why Jurassic Park would have been a very different film with Skye's newly identified 'monster'
The 167-million-year-old ‘false snake of Elgol’ was apparently a devourer of dinosaurs, but only the baby ones
As scary movies go, the 1993 film Jurassic Park is right up there, inviting us to imagine the terror of being hunted by a Tyrannosaurus rex. However, things could have been very different.
What if, instead of T. rex, the villain had been played by another relic from the age of the dinosaurs, such as the newly identified, 167-million-year-old “false snake of Elgol”, aka Breugnathair elgolensis? A fossil of the creature was found near Elgol on Skye by National Museums Scotland curator Dr Stig Walsh in 2016 and has since undergone detailed scans that helped identify it as a new species.
It apparently had some highly recurved teeth, which might sound scary, until you learn that it was only about 16 inches from nose to tail. So if you found yourself trapped on an island with one, it would probably be doing the running away.
That said, it may have been on the feisty side as it is thought its diet included baby dinosaurs. Early mammals were also on the menu. So it perhaps couldn’t eat us, but might have gulped down a distant ancestor or six.
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