DISCOVERY

Researchers Uncover a Plesiosaur

		The excavation team works to uncover the plesiosaur fossil

Some 70 million years ago, in the great sea that once covered Nebraska, a giant lizard-like plesiosaur swam. When it died, its bones settled on the ocean floor, where it remained undisturbed.

Until Mike Baldwin, a science teacher from Texas, discovered parts of its skeleton in dirt eroding from the hillside along Highway 84 near Center, in north central Nebraska. Baldwin, a teacher and fossil enthusiast, carefully recovered two neck bones, about the size of coffee cans, and knew he had something exciting. He figured he had a plesiosaur and contacted the University of Nebraska State Museum.

On May 20, Baldwin, who hails originally from Creighton, Neb., Mike Voorhies, Shane Tucker, Bruce Bailey and Greg Brown of the State Museum began a two-week excavation that uncovered the fossil and moved it to its new home in Nebraska Hall.

The project, which was the first major dig in 2003 for the museum, marked a significant find for the Highway Salvage Paleontology program. "It's a red-letter day when someone finds one of these creatures," Voorhies said. "Who has ever seen an actual sea monster in the rock?" he asked. "Not very many of us. I think people in Nebraska don't even realize that we had things like that living here."

As many as 1,200 visitors stopped to look at the excavation--small groups of school children, families passing by, local curious, and the media--while the group carefully uncovered the bones, covered them in tissue paper and plaster casts and removed them from the shallow roadside cliff. They now sit waiting further study at Nebraska Hall, where Bailey and other co-workers and volunteers will continue to use tiny flexible knives and brushes to extract the bones from the chalk and piece the specimen back together.

Bailey said the specimen is probably a long-neck plesiosaur, and only the sixth articulated specimen found in Nebraska during the 130-year history of fossil-collecting in the state. About one-third of the 60 to 70 neck vertebrae were recovered, but not the skull, which would have been an extremely rare find.

"An articulated specimen (with its bones joined) like this is incredibly rare it's probably the second-best one found in Nebraska," Bailey said. Another lies in the floor of the Mesozoic Gallery in the State Museum.

"Every summer that the Highway Salvage program has been going, at least five or six of what I would call major finds have been made," said Bailey. "There is so much road work going on in Nebraska and so many fossils just under the soil, that pretty much every major earth-moving project in the state uncovers some bones."

Over the years, thousands and thousands of fossils would have been lost to science and the state without the program.

NEBRASKA STATE MUSEUM