The remains of a prehistoric reptile that was as long as a bus, with teeth larger than cucumbers. In a head that could swallow an adult human whole, have been discovered on the Norwegian Arctic islands of Svalbard. Svalbard lies about halfway between the Norwegian mainland and the North Pole.

The University of Oslo's Natural History Museum said researchers on the remote Svalbard islands had discovered the remains of a short-necked plesiosaur, a prehistoric marine reptile. This morning special web pages devoted to the find were published by the University of Oslo.

There has been found numerous fragments of Plesiosaur in England, Russia and Argentina, But this is believed to be the first complete Pliosaur skeleton ever found. It belonged to a larger family of marine reptiles known as plesiosaurs that existed between 210 and 65 million years ago.

The 150-million-year-old remains of the 10-metre-long ocean-going predator were found on the 5. of August. During the 11 day expidition, the team of paleotologists found a total of 28 fossils on the hillside.

They are made up of two groups of reptiles - plesiosaurs and the ichthyosaurs. Ichthyosaurs being a smaler sea lizard. Though most ichthyosaurs averaged 4-6 meters in length, some of the largest reached an astounding 23 meters.

Plesiosaurs looked a bit like descriptions of the Loch Ness monster.

It used two sets of powerful flippers to fly through the water. Some plesiosaurs possessed a small head suspended at the end of a ridiculously long neck, while members of another plesiosaur group, popularly known as pliosaurs, had short necks but relatively massive skulls.

All the fossils discovered on the dig would have roamed the cool seas at the same time as dinosaurs.

"The skull is reckoned to be 2.1 meters long and the vertebrae stretch out at least six meters along the side of the mountain.

The preservation conditions in the black slate at the site are perfect. Only a few vertebrae and the snout had fallen a short way down the side of the mountain. The rest awaits a major excavation in 2007." said Harald Hurum, associate professor at the Natural History Museum at UiO..

The voracious plesiosaurs were like the Tyrannosaurus rex of the oceans, except its head is much bigger. About 2.1 meters long, compared to about 1.6 meters for Tyrannosaurus rex.