Fossils of Aquatic Reptile Plesiosaur From Jurassic Period Discovered in Texas

Fossilized plesiosaur backbone and flipper were unearthed in Texas. The remains were reportedly from the aquatic reptile that roamed the planet during the late Jurassic period.

Fossilized Plesiosaur Found in Texas

A plesiosaur, an aquatic reptile from the Jurassic period, was dug up thousands of feet above sea level in the Malone highlands of western Texas. Bone pieces from its flipper-like arms and backbone were found.

The latest discovery provides a glimpse into the shallow water that predominated 150 million years ago over the deserts of northeastern Mexico and western Texas, Daily Mail reported.

Paleontologists still have many unanswered questions about Texas during the Late Jurassic, the time of Earth's largest and most renowned dinosaurs. This is largely because the state has so few preserved Jurassic-aged rock formations.

Only 13 square miles of rock on top of the Malone mountain range contain almost everything that is still there from the Jurassic Texas ocean floor.

But now that a new plesiosaur has been found, the search for more fossils has begun.

According to co-author of the current study and vertebrate paleontologist Louis Jacobs, geologists will search the area for additional bones. They'll eventually locate them.

The weathered plesiosaur remains were discovered during two fossil-hunting excursions conducted by geoscientist and University of Texas at Austin research associate Steve May.

According to May in a release from UT Austin, there is still more to be found to help us understand what life was like in this region of Texas during the Jurassic. He wishes to encourage further dino-hunting in the Malone through their report describing the bones and other fossils, published this week in the peer-reviewed journal Rocky Mountain Geology.

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Why Researchers Search for Jurassic Remains in Texas

Prior to May's find, the only Jurassic-era fossils discovered in Texas were ancient invertebrates resembling shellfish, such as ammonites and snails.

However, May and his team had discovered a crucial hint that more substantial fossil remains were still there in the Lone Star state.

Large unexplained bone fragments were mentioned in passing in a 1938 paper on the geology of the Malone Mountains by Claude Albritton, a future geology professor at Southern Methodist University (SMU).

After learning in 2015 that there were no Jurassic bones in the Texas fossil record, the lead was enough to entice May to the Malone range.

May exclaimed, you don't want to think that Texas is devoid of any Jurassic bones. Despite the fact that the recently discovered plesiosaur fossils are corroded and fragmented, professor emeritus at SMU Jacobs anticipates that researchers will now "look for the other things that interest them" around the Malone.

The Jurassic sediments that would eventually form the Malone mountain range came to rest just a few kilometers inland from the ancient shoreline.

The Malone area was a part of the "Late Jurassic Chihuahua trough," a tropical area "possibly similar to the Gulf of California today in terms of both geologic setting and biologic diversity," according to the researchers.

According to their latest study, the Late Jurassic Chihuahua trough supported tropical and temperate species from coastal and oceanic habitats, similar to the contemporary Gulf of California. It would have been home to an abundance of aquatic dinosaurs yet remaining to find.