College of Charleston Student Bags Colossal Sea Lizard Fossil

^{Above: Scott Persons and Monika Angner}

It had been a long day in the Badlands of Wyoming.

“Tired, hungry and in need of a shower, most of the field team was wilting,” recalls Scott Persons, the expedition’s leader and a College of Charleston professor of paleobiology. “But Monika was hiking way out in front and was still carefully scanning the shale beds for fossils.”

Rising senior and geology major Monika Angner had earned a spot on the annual CofC Dinosaur Expedition in May by winning a SURF Grant, and she wasn’t about to waste a moment of the opportunity.

“I had bent down to collect a little vertebrae and was filling out a specimen card when she called to me,” says Persons. “Monika shouted: ‘Dr. Persons, I think I found something BIG!’ Well … I could hear the excitement in her voice.”

Angner had found the skeleton of a mosasaur – a giant marine lizard that swam in the prehistoric seas at the same time dinosaurs were roaming the land. It was big: By Persons’ estimation the animal would have measured over 25 feet in length.

“At our field site, mosasaur fossils aren’t especially rare,” Persons says. “Broken vertebrae and teeth are frequently collected, right on the surface. But Monica found what looks to be a nearly complete skull, with the neck, back, limbs and tail all fully articulated. A skeleton in that good of condition is extraordinary. Plus, it’s a contender for the largest mosasaur yet found at the site.”

Exactly how big and how complete the specimen is, along with what particular species of mosasaur it belongs to, are questions that will have to wait until work on the skeleton is completed. The two-foot-long skull traveled in a protective plaster jacket all the way from the Wyoming badlands to College of Charleston’s Mace Brown Museum of Natural History. There, Angner and Persons will continue to pick at, clean and measure it.

“It’s a tradition in paleontology that, when a really cool specimen is found – one that will require lots of personnel hours over multiple field seasons to fully excavate and lots of lab hours to study – the discoverer gets to give the specimen a nickname,” says Persons, pointing to examples like Sue, the big T. rex, and Lucy the Australopithecus. “So, we asked Monika what she wanted to call it.”

In honor of her big sister, Angner named the sea lizard Jillian.