Remains Of Gigantic ‘Sea Monster’ Found In Mississippi Riverbed

The remains of a giant “sea monster” found in a Mississippi riverbed have been determined to belong to the largest mosasaur ever identified in the state. Researchers who have studied the fossil have estimated that the dinosaur in question was at least 30 feet in length.

According to a report by The Dispatch in Columbus, Mississippi, the discovery of the gigantic “sea monster” remains was made by James Starnes, the director of the surface geology division for the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, as he was walking along a creek last month, field-checking a geological map of an area between the city and the Sam D. Hamilton Noxubee Wildlife Refuge.

Starnes was looking for fossilized seashells when he noticed a bone sticking out of the ground. “I knew it was bone,” Starnes said. “But I didn’t know it was a mosasaur until [colleague Jonathan Leard] pulled it out.”

The bone James Starnes found turned out to be a lumbar vertebra from a mosasaur. The bone from the the dinosaur’s spine was about seven inches wide, which is how they estimated the creature’s overall length.

“This hands down was the biggest mosasaur vertebra I’ve ever seen in my life,” Starnes said.

“This one is a particularly large one,” George Phillips, paleontology curator for the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science said. “This one is suggestive of … the maximum size for these individuals.”

Mosasaurs were marine reptiles that existed towards the end of the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago). They had skulls structured similarly to modern monitor lizards and like other lizards and alligators today, they just continued to grow until they died. One of the largest ever discovered, based on a skull artifact, was estimated to be approximately 56 feet long.

“This was a true, true sea monster. This is bigger than most dinosaurs walking around on land,” Starnes told the Clarion-Ledger, adding, “This is a big animal. The maximum (weight) is about 20,000 pounds that this animal could have gotten. This is bigger than most dinosaurs walking around on land.”

So how did a “sea monster” end up in Mississippi? Well, in 2021, mosasaur remains such as this were found as far north as Kansas.

“Mississippi was completely covered at the time by warm shallow tropical sea that was teaming with life, including a wide diversity of sharks, fish, marine lizards, and ammonites,” Starnes told Live Science. “Pterosaurs and even some birds would have been flying overhead while a variety of both plant and meat-eating dinosaurs of different sizes and kinds would have been walking the shore lines and through the wooded forests along the coastal estuaries.”