The mosasaur vertebrae measured 7 inches across – credit James StarnesGeologists recently unearthed the vertebrae of a giant prehistoric marine lizard during fieldwork.
Measuring a full 7 inches across, an extrapolation of that size would place the animal among the largest ever to swim in the prehistoric precursor to the Gulf of Mexico.
“I … was completely awe-struck by its size,” said James Starnes, a geologist at the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality. “The feeling you get when you find a fossil, even as a professional, never gets old. But when you find something you have never seen before, the elation can be overwhelming.”
Starnes was speaking to Live Science about his recent trip to an area near Starkville where he was planning a survey of the geologic layers under the ground.
They had already found traces of ancient life in beds of seashells from when Mississippi was underwater millions of years ago. In a layer of mud, they noticed something clearly not rock. They brought the fossil to the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, and paleontologists identified it as belonging to Mosasaurus hoffmannii, perhaps the largest of its kind to ever exist.
There is considerable morphological variability across the currently recognized species in the Mosasaurus families.
The ‘MosaScale’ – credit Slate Weasel, CC 0.0.As it happens, the first Mosasaur was discovered over 250 years ago in the Netherlands, and was named after Johann Leonard Hoffmann, a biologist and physician who found a second specimen in the same quarry.
That first specimen would prove to be of the species generally thought of to be the largest ever. It was capable of growing beyond 30 feet in length and weighed around 10 tons—a mature elephant plus a sedan car, for comparison.
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It was larger than most dinosaurs on land, Starnes remarked, and a “true, true sea monster.”
The vertebrae dated to the end of the Late Cretaceous Period, around 66 million years ago, when the animal it belonged to would have swum in a shallow sea rich with marine life of all shapes and sizes, from these large mosasaurs and other marine reptiles to fish, sharks, and sea turtles.
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“While the dinosaurs ruled the land, these Mesozoic era oceans were likely the most dangerous of any time in the entire history of our planet,” according to a Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality post announcing the fossil find.
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