CHARLESTON, S.C., Sept. 28, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The International Peer-Reviewed Journal iscience published a paper on Monday, September 26, 2022, by a research team led by the College of Charleston geology professor Scott people which describes the discovery of a new species of prehistoric marine reptile.
With a length of more than 23 feet, Serpentisuchops (sur-pen-ta-soo-kops) was a marine animal that swam the seas 70 million years ago while dinosaurs roamed the earth, and the discovery changes what paleontologists thought they knew about a group of animals plesiosaur.
“When I was a student,” says Persons, “I was taught that all late-developing plesiosaurs fall into one of two anatomical categories: those with really long necks and tiny heads, and those with short necks and really long jaws. Well, our new animal completely confuses those categories.”
Serpentisuchops, whose name literally means “snake crocodile face,” has both a long snake neck and long crocodile-like jaws. That makes it an evolutionary nerd and a surprise to scientists.
The remains of the creature, defying all categories, were unearthed in a sulphurous wasteland in eastern Wyoming. This land belonged to a rancher, Anna Pfister, who donated the fossil to the Glenrock Paleon Museum, where Persons is a research curator. For this donation, the animal receives its full two-part biological name: Serpentisuchops pfisterae. At the museum, a diligent team of volunteers set about chipping away the rock encrusting the bones and preparing the specimen for scientific study. Among these volunteers were a group of elderly women affectionately dubbed “Glenrock Bone Biddies” who formed the paleontological equivalent of a seeding circle around the preparation of fossil bones for study. During this period of preparation, the strangeness of the skeleton became apparent.
The entire cervical skeleton is beautifully preserved, with each bone communicating with the next…
