HUNTINGTON, W.Va. (WOWK) – Researchers from Marshall University in West Virginia have helped make a breakthrough in the world of paleontology.
While working with an international investigative team from Chile and Canada, the researchers identified a group of fossils found near British Columbia’s Vancouver Island that belong to a new genus of a type of sea creature called plesiosaurs. The genus is a biological classification that is a slightly broader category of creatures than a species.
Marshall says the new genus has officially been named “Traskasaura sandrae,” and that it was a “39-foot-long, long-necked creature” whose large, sharp, robust teeth were “well-suited for crushing.” They also say it likely used its long neck to attack prey from below.
The group’s findings have been published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Systematic Paleontology, available online here, along with photographs of the fossilized bones. Marshall University biology professor F. Robin O’Keefe served as the lead author on the research article. He and his team from Marshall have been published in multiple peer-reviewed publications for their different research projects.
While the plesiosaur is not a new discovery in itself, the Traskasaura sandrae has a unique combination of primitive and advanced traits not seen in the elasmosaur genus of plesiosaur.
“Plesiosaur fossils have been known for decades in British Columbia,” O’Keefe, who is an acknowledged expert on marine reptiles from the age of dinosaurs, said. “However, the identity of the animal that left the fossils has remained a mystery, even as it was declared BC’s provincial fossil in 2023. Our new research, published today, finally solves this mystery.”
According to Britannica, the plesiosaurs were a group of long-necked reptiles whose fossils date back to between the late Triassic Period to the Cretaceous Period, or around 215 million to 66 million years ago.
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