Source: Illustration by James Havens, @alaskapaleoproject
Seven years after an elk hunter accidentally
stumbled on a fossil in Montana's Charles M. Russell National Wildlife
Refuge, the new species he found by mistake has a name — Nakonanectes
bradti.
"Nakonanectes" is to honor the
native Nakona people of what is now Montana, and "bradti" is after David
Bradt, the hunter who discovered the fossil, according to a statement from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
When
Bradt first discovered the fossil in a stream in 2010, he believed it
was from a dinosaur. "It's about the size of a cow, and I'm thinking
it's a triceratops," he told the Associated Press.
But when paleontologists excavated and studied the fossil, it turned
out it belonged to a prehistoric sea creature that lived in an inland
sea east of the Rocky Mountains some 70 million years ago, according to
the AP.
The excavation site where Nakonanectes bradti was accidentally discovered by an elk hunter.Source: Erin Clark/AP
The
creature, as paleontologists realized, was a previously undiscovered
species of elasmosaur, a carnivorous sea-dweller that had a tiny head
and large, paddle-shaped limbs. Most elasmosaurs, the AP reported,
had long necks that stretched up to 18 feet long. But Nakonanectes
bradti, the new species that Bradt stumbled upon, had a much shorter
neck.
"This group is famous for having
ridiculously long necks, I mean necks that have as many as 76
vertebrae," Patrick Druckenmiller, a paleontologist at the University of
Alaska Museum of the North, told the AP. "What absolutely shocked us when we dug it out — it only had somewhere around 40 vertebrae."
Nakonanectes
bradti, the short-necked elasmosaur, has now officially joined the
canon of known prehistoric sea creatures. The inland sea in which
Nakonanectes bradti lived covered a large swath of what is now North
America — it stretched from Montana to Minnesota and from Canada to the
Gulf of Mexico, the AP reported.
There
could be more fossils out there that belong to other
as-yet-undiscovered species, Druckenmiller said. Someone just needs to
find them.
