Mosasaur unveiling comes 40 years after discovery

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This article was published 16/03/2015 (4043 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It took the Canadian Fossil Discovery Centre nearly 40 years to unveil its latest artifact, but what’s a few decades when the giant dinosaur fossil is more than 80 million years old?

Today the Morden museum will draw the curtain back on Suzy, a nine-metre-long fossil of a mosasaur, a ferocious marine reptile.

“She was a carnivore that ate anything she could get her teeth into,” said Peter Cantelon, executive director of the CFDC.

“Mosasaurs were the T. Rex of the sea. They ate everything, from sharks and sea turtles to squid and smaller mosasaurs. It had two sets of teeth. It had its regular teeth, but on the roof of its mouth it had another set that could move independently and pull food back into its throat.”

Suzy joins Bruce, the largest mosasaur on display in the world at more than 13 metres long. He arrived at the CFDC in 2003.

Cantelon said it can take many years to excavate a fossil of this size, but he admits there were lengthy stretches of inactivity along the way.

He is particularly proud because Suzy was found northwest of Morden, not far from where Bruce was discovered.

“It’s our own piece of Jurassic Park,” he said, referring to the Hollywood blockbuster and several sequels, the newest of which is set to come out in June. “A museum is fortunate to have a single specimen, but to have them both, not just on display, but to be the museum responsible for finding them, makes for a unique exhibit.”

Cantelon said the entire land area that is now Manitoba was once covered by the Western Interior Seaway, which was an inland sea running from the Arctic Ocean to the Caribbean Sea. It was populated by an enormous number of marine reptiles, including plesiosaurs (fish-eaters with long necks, big bodies and small heads), sea turtles, crocodiles and, of course, mosasaurs.

The CFDC also houses the world’s largest and most complete Squalicorax (a shark) as well as the only publicly displayed vial of wooly mammoth blood.

geoff.kirbyson@freepress.mb.ca