The fossil of a giant sea monster found in the Arctic had a bite that would make T-Rex look feeble, scientists have said.

The 50ft (15m) Jurassic-era marine reptile, known as ‘Predator X’ had a crushing 33,000 lbs (15 metric tons) per square inch bite force, scientists at Oslo University said of the find on the Norwegian Arctic archipelago of Svalbard.

‘With a skull that’s more than 10 feet long you’d expect the bite to be powerful but this is off the scale,’ said Joern Hurum, who led the excavation last year.

‘It’s much more powerful than T-Rex,’ he said of the pliosaur reptile that would have been a top marine predator.

The scientists reconstructed the predator’s head and estimated the force by comparing it with the similarly-shaped jaws of alligators in a park in Florida.

Predator X’s bite was over 10 times more powerful than any modern animal and four times the bite of a T-Rex, experts said of the fossil, thought to be about 147 million years old.

The teeth of the pliosaur were a foot long. The scientists reconstructed the reptile from a partial skull and 20,000 fragments of skeleton.