By When you give a nerd a chance to research…
The prompt for this piece was dinosaurs or just extinct reptiles or extinct birds. The evolutionary splits are quite fantastic, but that’s a rabbit hole for an other time. This was either a loved or hated prompt because dinosaurs or animals alive during the days of the dinosaur don’t interest everyone and that is okay.
The animal I discuss in this piece is one that I learned about while in Kansas at the Fort Wallace Museum. If you want to learn more about this museum, check out my video.
I Once Swam Shallow In-Land Sea
You would think that having lived from the Triassic to the Cretaceous period I would earn the title of dinosaur. One of the tyrant lizards but no I’m just an aquatic reptile, like some modern crocodile. How is a penguin a modern avian dinosaur but I don’t qualify? It’s not my fault I evolved without proper hips. Freaking paleontologists.
I guess I should back up and introduce myself. I’m a plesiosaur. Those people in charge of taxonomy like to be confusing. They gave me a ‘saur name but not the overall label. I really wish that was the worst of their atrocities where I am concerned. I swam the shallow inland sea during the late Cretaceous. My fossil was found in the middle of nowhere Kansas near the Colorado border by an army doctor, Theophilus H. Turner, stuck at Fort Wallace. A fort that is no longer there I might add, the wood was repurposed over the years until barely a memory remained.
Anyway, the poor doctor dug me out of the chalk layer and shipped me off to freaking Edward Drinker Cope in 1868. The man is a disappointment to the field of palitology. In his rush to name me as a new species (Elasmosaurus platyurus) he put my head on my tail! Yes, I realize that a twenty-three foot neck is a bit extra but it’s not my fault that in his rush he embarrassed himself and destroyed his professional reputation in front of his rival.
As for me, I’m not sure where my fossilized skeleton rests. I’m still searching for my bones. But when I get tired of searching, I swim in the skies over where my sea used to be. Hunting for the ghosts of boney fish and chasing the mosasaurus (he is not a dinosaur either).
Resources:
- https://www.britannica.com/animal/plesiosaur
- https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ask-smithsonian-what-is-dinosaur-180967448/
- https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/dinosaur-rivalry/
- https://ftwallace.com/
- https://oceansofkansas.com/tale-tail.html
Thank you KW Photography for allowing me to use your wonderful photos!
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