Fossil Hunting

In Which I Acquire a Giant Monster's Tooth

Today we went browsing into a hippy store on Kirkwood, so that I could see if they had any fossils to purchase. Man, did they ever. Everything from gorgeous giant ammonites to petrified wood to weird snail fossils, even a tiny little trilobite that I now call my own.

But they had a group of something I've never seen before -- Mosasaur teeth.

For the unitiated, Mosasaurs were a family of giant reptiles that lived in the Cretaceous period, toward the end of the dinosaur era. They were true monsters. Basically, imagine a crocodile with flippers, some of which were more than 50 feet long, and you have a Mosasaur. Then add double-hinged snakelike jaws so that they could swallow their prey whole. They ate sharks, amongst other things.

My Mosasaur tooth is broken at the root so you can even see the layers that made it up before it was turned to stone, at least a bit. It's really something and I'll have to put pictures up later.

According to the box, my tooth is from a phosphate mine in Morocco; according to online fossil retailers, that plus its round shape indicates it is most likely a Mosasaurinae Liodon Anceps, which was about 40 feet long and particularly vicious.

Liodon was a large mosasaur with "powerful, highly specialised teeth...probably the most efficient in the Mosasauridae for tearing off chunks of soft bodied prey such as fishes and other marine reptiles...[Liodon] was a formidable predator, the nearest mosasaur analogue to sharks." (Lingham-Soliar 1993).

Length: (estimated) up to 12+ m. (40+ ft.)); skull: 1.2 m. (4 ft.)

Sources: Wikipedia
Buried Treasure Fossiles (for pictures of the mosasaur teeth found in the Moroccan mine that my own came from, apparently)
Dinosauria.com A description of the species that I think mine is from is under 'Liodon Anceps' on this page.