A squad of miners face for gemstones in Alberta , Canada , sustain way of life more than they bargained for when they came across the full skeleton of an ancientpredatory marine reptilian . While these incredible fossilised stiff would make for one hell of a necklace , the troupe that found the specimen has instead reach it over to the nearby Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology .
Earlier this year , miner puzzle out on behalf of Enchanted Designs Limited had been dig in the Bearpaw Formation , which was submerged beneath the Western Interior Seaway during the previous Cretaceous period , about 70 million eld ago . They were seek for ammolite , a colourful gemstone made up of the fossilise remains of an ancient mollusc called ammonite , which subsist in the now dry out - up waters that once dominated the landscape painting .
Given the array of maritime life that once inhabited this part of Canada , mineworker are never too surprised to issue forth across the odd fossilized leatherneck reptilian , although it ’s not every daylight that they excavate a completemosasaur .
In its day , this specimen – which measured 6 to 7 meters ( 20 to 23 feet ) in distance – would have engross the highest rank in the local food chain , and while it is longsighted extinct , some of its closest relatives still cast Earth in the form of snake andmonitor lizard .
Donald Henderson from the Royal Tyrell Museum of Palaeontology toldLive Sciencethat “ we ’ve capture everything from the head almost to the point of the tail , ” although he says that the flippers are more or less all absent , having either rotted away or been “ bitten off ” .
It ’s thought that there were once 38 dissimilar species of mosasaur , all of which conk during theCretaceous - Paleogene extinction eventthat wiped out the dinosaur 66 million years ago . This finicky individual probably belonged to the genusTylosaurus , and while it wo n’t be available in any jewellery stores , it may before long be on video display at the museum .
[ H / T : Live skill ]
