UA Museum to Display Giant Water Reptile’s 80-Million-Year-Old Bones

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – Fossilized remains of an 80-million-year-old gigantic water reptile, found in Greene County, will be publicly displayed for the first time at the Alabama Museum of Natural History on The University of Alabama campus, beginning Monday evening, March 4.

This particular animal, a type of mosasaur named Tylosaurus, was about 23-feet long, said Dr. Ed Hooks, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the UA museum. Initially discovered near the banks of the Tombigbee River in January 1993 by a pair of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers rangers, the mosasaur’s bones exhibit scarring indicative of its fierce nature, Hooks said. He estimates that more than 2,000 hours of work – much of it completed by UA students and volunteers – went into recovering and preparing the pre-historic specimen for display.

“Mosasaurs were nasty customers,” said James Lamb, a 1994 UA New College graduate considered one of the world’s leading experts on mosasaurs and who, as a UA student, was heavily involved in the recovery of this particular animal. “If you were in the ocean, you would have been worried about them. They ranged from 9-feet long up to about 50-feet long,” said Lamb, who is now completing his doctorate in vertebrate paleontology at North Carolina State University.

The vicious reptiles were ocean dwellers that breathed air and preferred shallow depths. “Some of them were primarily ambush predators,” said Lamb, “if you can imagine something that big hiding. They propelled themselves by moving their tail from side to side the way an alligator does. They may actually have used their large bodies to physically trap their prey between themselves and the beach.”

Although mosasaurs lived near the end of the dinosaur age – from about 90 million to 65 million years ago – Lamb said the species was not a dinosaur. “If you took a big Komodo dragon and turned his legs into flippers, you would have a mosasaur,” he said.

Hooks said museum volunteers have worked tirelessly to make displaying the animal a reality.

“To me, the most interesting part of this has been to watch so many students and other volunteers in the lab work so hard on this and enjoy, not just working on it, but learning about mosasaurs,” Hooks said. Of the animal’s original 23-foot length, about 20 feet of its skull and spinal column were recovered and preserved.

Cleaning and restructuring fossilized bones and bone fragments is tedious, Hooks said. The work was done, primarily, with dental tools and toothbrushes. “You have some people who may have labored for a year on a few individual bones of the animal and were never able to see the whole specimen,” he said.

Dr. Harry Blewitt, a professor in chemistry and New College, is an amateur paleontologist who has volunteered 2-4 hours per week on the project for the past three years. “I’m fairly patient,” Blewitt said, “and I like working with my hands. I’m a wood carver, so I don’t mind sitting down for two hours and cleaning a little piece of bone.”

Some 20 people helped prepare the mosasaur for display and cleaned and organized the several hundred bones and bone pieces, including 81 vertebrae, Hooks said.

The public will have an opportunity to see the mosasaur, nicknamed “Bossie,” on display from March 5-April 7, during the Museum’s normal business hours, 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, and 1-4:30 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $2 for adults and $1 for seniors and children. Guided tours for schools and other groups can be arranged on Tuesdays-Fridays by calling 348-9473. The public is also invited to hear Lamb give a presentation on mosasaurs at the Museum, on Monday, March 4, from 7-8 p.m. When his lecture is concluded, the mosasaur display will be opened.

As a UA student, Lamb was working as a member of the Museum’s paleontology staff when the Museum was first notified of the fossilized find at the rather inaccessible site. “It was difficult to work because everything we brought down to use in the excavation had to go back up this very steep drainage ramp,” Lamb said. “When we did get the skull excavated it was within a block of rock wrapped in plaster that weighed several hundred pounds. We had a half dozen blocks that weighed that much.”

Although mosasaurs once lived around the world, few places make such good mosasaur fossil hunting as does Alabama, Lamb said. “Alabama, it turns out, is one of the top three places in the world to look for mosasaurs, along with Belgium and Kansas,” Lamb said. In particular, the soft soil of the Black Belt region, which, along with most of south Alabama, once lay underneath the ocean, is ideal, he said.

The Museum’s staffers and volunteers find various fossilized specimens much more quickly than they can catalog them, Hooks said, so the Museum is accepting volunteers to work on various projects. Free training courses in paleontology are available to volunteers. “Last year we found three mosasaurs during our field work, and we are going back to excavate them next year.”