Dutch mosasaur discovery news

Translated from L1 regional radio in the Netherlands:

Researchers at the Natural History Museum in Maastricht have unearthed approximately one-third of the mosasaur which was discovered last week.

The rest of the skeleton had probably already been excavated during the marl extraction in the ENCI quarry and so, it disappeared.

The scientists are pleased that most of the head has been recovered. In addition, they found, inter alia, the collar-bone and a so-called bud tooth of a few millimeters in size.

This is a new tooth hidden in the jaw which only emerges as an old tooth falls out.

Daily De Telegraaf again makes the mistake of calling the fossil a dinosaur. While mosasaurs are much closer related to, eg, monitor lizards of today then to dinosaurs.

Mosasaur discovered in Maastricht

Yesterday, the natural history museum in Maastricht in the Netherlands did not yet want to say which huge fossil animal from the age of dinosaurs they had discovered near the local ENCI factory.

Today, at a press conference, there was more clarity.

They said it was a big mosasaur, probably a Mosasaurus hofmanni, or a closely related species.

Mosasaurus hofmanni was the first mosasaur ever discovered amidst much publicity in the eighteenth century, also in Maastricht. The original fossil was stolen from Maastricht by French soldiers, and brought to the Paris museum where it still is.

The fossil is 13 meter long, 68 million years old, and is called Carlo, after the ENCI worker who first discovered it.

A twitter message from the museum says that the skull of the newly discovered mosasaur (the only part of the animal recovered completely so far, though an important part) is about 10% bigger than the Paris specimen’s.

Dutch NOS TV says that probably, after the death of the mosasaur, scavenging sharks dispersed its remains. The search for other parts of the skeleton is still continuing.