Researchers have uncovered the fossilized remains of an ancient, long-necked species of marine reptile known as an elasmosaur in the mountains of southern Alaska, marking the first time remains of the creature have been found in that state, according to reports.
Patrick Druckenmiller, earth sciences curator at the University of Alaska Museum of the North, told LiveScience that the creature also had paddlelike appendages and lived in the seas roughly 75 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous period. The elasmosaur is a member of the odd group of marine reptiles known as plesiosaurs, the explained to the website.
The majority of the bones remain trapped within a rocky cliff in the Talkeetna Mountains, which means that scientists have not yet had an opportunity to measure the creature’s skeleton as of yet. However, Druckenmiller (who visited the fossil site in June) estimated that the animal was about 25 feet (7.6 meters) long, and that its neck comprised nearly half of that body length.
The elasmosaur was carnivorous, he told KTNA in Talkeetna, and said that while he was “a little loathe to use the comparison,” compared the creature to the mythical Loch Ness Monster, a long-necked creature that he explained was “basically based on the body plan of an elasmosaur.”
How the fossils wound up in a cliff
Druckenmiller said the remains were originally discovered by Anchorage resident Curvin Metzler, who contacted the museum after he spotted the bones eroding out from the face of a cliff. He told KTNA that Metzler did “the right thing” by reporting the discovery so that the museum could “share it with the rest of the world.”
So how did the rocks wind up in the side of a mountain? Druckenmiller explained that the rocks currently containing the fossils would have been on the seabed some 70 to 75 million years ago, as there was a body of water along the southern margin of modern-day Alaska at the time that has since risen thousands of feet over millions of years due to tectonic activity.
“Alaska looked very different” at that time, he added in comments made to KTNA. “In fact, these rocks, which were being laid down as sediment below sea level, were along the southern margin of what was Alaska, then. In the last seventy-million years, because of movements of the Pacific seafloor under Alaska, they’ve been crunched and brought up above sea level.”
Druckenmiller concluded that he believed that the majority of the elasmosaur skeleton remains stuck in the mountain, and told local media that they will continue working to extract it over the summer of 2016. The new discovery comes more than a decade after workers at a quarry in the same mountain range found remains from a plant-eating ornithopod dinosaur.
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Feature Image: James Havens/UAF
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