Fossil fun turns into fabulous find
By MIKE CORN
Now that he's learned more about his donation to Sternberg Museum of Natural History, Mahlon Tuttle knows he will have to change his story.
No longer will he be able to say he's donated, well, fossilized feces to the world-famous Sternberg.
"I tell all my friends that one day you're going to go down to Sternberg and see a pile of .... and it will say, donated by Mahlon Tuttle," he said. "I've had a lot of fun with it.
Initially, it had been thought the discovery on Tuttle's land was fossilized coprolites from a mosasaur, perhaps containing the remains of fish and birds.
That would be a highly unusual discovery.
But what Tuttle, his wife, Carolyn, and Tom Nolan soon learned from adjunct curator Mike Everhart is the discovery might instead be the stomach contents from a mosasaur, a huge sea-going creature that lived in the inland seas nearly 80 million years ago.
It might be, Everhart said, a colonite -- the partially undigested remains of the last supper for a mosasaur before it died or was killed.
Learning that much was half the fun for the Tuttles, who visited Hays on Thursday to make the donation.
Nolan traveled in from Aurora, Colo., with the plaster-jacketed remains, which were given to Everhart. Nolan and a group of other fossil hunters with the Westminster Paleontology Society frequently search for fossils on land owned by the Tuttles.
The colonite and several vertebrae from the mosasaur that consumed the meal came from land owned by Tuttle southwest of Quinter.
Mahlon Tuttle recalls the day he was called by Nolan and told of the discovery.
"He called me and told me they found it," Tuttle said. "He said we found mosasaur feces.
"And I said, 'What?' "
Mosasaur feces is indeed quite rare. Everhart said he has a single specimen, about the size of his fist.
The stomach contents, he said, will be quite valuable as well, because they will give insight into what the mosasaur consumed.
Nolan told Everhart the fossilized remains contained bird bones and the jaw of a fish.
Mosasaurs, because of size and ferocity, effectively ruled the inland seas 80 million years ago when water covered virtually all of western Kansas. With a huge mouth and gaping teeth, the sea-going reptiles ate nearly anything they wanted.
"I'll have to see what all we've got in there," Everhart said of cracking open the plaster, a technique frequently used to help protect the fossil when it is extracted from the ground.
"I told him if he found something worth a lot of money, he's to let me know," Tuttle said.
"I don't know about a lot of money, but it's scientifically important," Everhart said.
And with that, Everhart expressed his thanks for donating the find to Sternberg.
"We're glad to donate it to Sternberg," Tuttle said, noting members of the Sternberg family have collected on his land for years now.
About that time, Nolan unwrapped one of the items collected and presented it to Everhart.
"Something's odd," he said. "That's way too big."
He agreed they were mosasaur neck vertebrae, but said they were too big for another mosasaur to have eaten it.
"Talk about fiber in the diet," he quipped. "What about the possibility that this is the owner? That it's the stomach content."
The vertebrae, he said, came from an animal 15 to 18 feet long.
A mosasaur 30 feet long, Everhart said, might have a stomach 6 feet long.
"Maybe I can't say I'm donating .... to the museum," Tuttle noted. "I'll have to change my story."
"Maybe it's on its way," Everhart said.
As it is, he said, the mosasaur might have died or been killed by something else in the fierce seas.
"These guys, even though they were the biggest predator out there, got no respect," Everhart said. "If they were injured, they were shark food."