Imagine hunting in the countryside and stumbling upon a fossil that turns out to be a new species of a prehistoric sea creature! This is exactly what happened with David Bradt, a hunter, who was hunting elk in Montana.
The Gazette describes how things unraveled. David saw something protruding in a creek, which he thought was petrified wood. On closer inspection, he found fossilized bones and knew it was that of a creature from prehistoric times.
He immediately photographed and reported his find to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Museum on the Rockies in Bozeman. Although it took merely three days to excavate the fossil, it took seven long years to positively identify the find as a never-known-before species of prehistoric sea creature that existed 70 million years ago.
The sea creature, now categorized with elasmosaur, inhabited the inland sea on the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains in the past. The fossil study threw up some startling details about the creature that was described in an article published in the "Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology".
According to ABC News, the fossil of elasmosaur recovered in the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, Montana was different from other elasmosaur finds. Its neck, measuring seven feet, was supported by only 40 vertebrae, whereas the elasmosaur fossils discovered elsewhere measured 18 feet and consisted of 76 vertebrae.
This difference put this elasmosaur into the new species category. What's more fascinating is the fact that both these species coexisted in the same area, negating the belief that elasmosaur evolved to get a longer neck.
It seems elasmosaurs were completely adapted to marine life. These carnivorous creatures, with small heads and paddle-like limbs, could measure 30 feet from head to the tip of their tail.
Patrick Druckenmiller, a paleontologist at the University of Alaska Museum of the North, when quizzed as to why there are more finds of terrestrial dinosaurs when this area of erstwhile inland sea is teeming with fossils had this to say, "... people out there are interested in land-living dinosaurs than marine reptiles." "There would be a lot more known, if more people were studying them," he concluded.
