researcher working along the side of a perpendicular cliff in Alaska ’s Talkeetna Mountains have reveal the 70 - million - twelvemonth - old fossils of a type of plesiosaur called an elasmosaur . These Late Cretaceous shipboard soldier reptilian had super retentive necks , small-scale caput , and paddle - like limb for swimming . “ image the mythologic Loch Ness giant and you have a middling good mind what it looked like,”Patrick Druckenmiller from the University of Alaska Museumsays in astatement . This is the first metre an elasmosaur has ever been excavate in this state .
Its vertebra was discovered eroding out of the four flush by Anchorage - ground fossil aggregator Curvin Metzler , who was actually looking for fossilized invertebrates . The bone were located about halfway up an 18 - meter ( 60 - invertebrate foot ) vertical cliff . Druckenmiller ’s team chaffer the site in June . “ We scram a good chunk of the animal,”he says , “ but there is still more to excavate . ” They trust to recover the rest of the skeleton next summertime .
Based on the size of the bones they ’ve successfully excavated , the animal was at least 7.6 meters ( 25 feet ) long , and one-half of that was just neck . In arecent subject area , researchers counted the number of vertebra in an elasmosaur discovered in the 1800s and previously dubbed “ the longest - necked vertebrate . ” It had 72 neck vertebrae , making it one of the longest - neck creature that ever lived ( but notthelongest ) .
Two other types of ancient nautical reptiles have antecedently been discovered in the bouldery hillsides of Alaska : dolphin - shaped ichthyosaurs and “ ocean lizard ” called thalattosaurs . The sediment in which this new skeleton was found was “ laid down on the Davy Jones’s locker about 70 to 75 million years ago , ” Druckenmiller tellsLive Science . “ At that time there was a sea along the southern margin of [ what is now ] Alaska . ” one thousand thousand of years of tectonic activity under that ancient ocean cause the seafloor to climb up .
Metzler ( left ) and Druckenmiller examine the spot where ivory were found sticking out of the cliff in the Talkeetna Mountains . Pat Druckenmiller .
