23 dic 2011
Say what you will about the oil sands, but for lovers of the dinosaur era, they've yielded an amazing discovery: the fossilized remains of a giant plesiosaur, the apex marine predator of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. An oil sands worker, Maggy Horvath, was shoveling ore about 35 kilometres north of Fort MacMurray when she struck what turned out to be part of the plesiosaur's neck. Staff from the Royal Tyrell Museum in Drumheller were called in, and they have begun the tricky process of carefully excavating the plesiosaur's remains. So far, just the neck and upper vertebrae have been recovered, although it's believed its ribs will be especially well preserved because it was positioned lying on its back. Plesiosaurs roamed the planet's oceans between 180 and 65 million years ago, and could grow to be as long as 25 metres. This fossil is the 10th to have been recovered on a Syncrude oil site, and is believed to be 115 million years old.
