WHY ARE THEY LOOKING FOR OIL ON WRANGEL ISLAND? Scientist thought he had stumbled upon an unusual stone, only for tests to show he had unearthed major dinosaur find. Tyuryakov said: It’s a monster with a massive neck – a little head but a very long neck, perhaps 15 metres in length alone. Its body is disproportionally large. My discovery was invaluable, not just something that is stone, with two fossilised plesiosaur vertebrae.This is the first discovery of fossil remains on Wrangel Island, and I’m proud. I’m just happy that I found her, having been on the island for a week.He added: Nobody has ever found anything like this. It’s cool, and I am the first! Plesiosaurs were thought to be common in the Arctic seas, with another vertebrae found by Soviet scientists on Uyedineniya Island, in the Kara Sea, during an expedition in the 1930s. Tyuryakov was part of a group of four scientists sent to Wrangel Island, in the Russian Far East, to take part in a complex expedition for a large energy company. They were there to spend seven days on the remote outpost studying a polar bear population, and were assisted by members of staff from the nature reserve, including the director Aleksandr Gruzdev. It was at the end of the expedition that he stumbled across the ‘stone’, and when he asked his colleagues if they thought it was of interest they said it looked ordinary. They believed it had taken its odd shape and markings as a result of being pounded for years by waves and wind. However, the scientist’s instincts told him it was much more than just a boulder so he took it with him back St Petersburg, before it was examined by experts at the city’s Zoological Museum. Preliminary tests stunned the researchers, who found the stone was actually likely to be two fossilised bones from a plesiosaurus, a dinosaur reptile often described as giant sea monster. They were among the most feared creatures that roamed the oceans 200 million years ago, with its body longer than a humpback whale and teeth the size of cucumbers. Thought to have had extremely long necks but small heads, and equipped with large flippers, they were the top marine predators during the Jurassic period. Some experts have even described them as the T-Rex of the ocean since they tended to feed on other marine reptiles. siberiantimes/science/casestudy/news/n0075-bones-from-200-million-year-old-monster-of-the-sea-found-by-accident-on-far-eastern-island/
Posted on: Thu, 22 Jan 2015 12:27:27 +0000