by Steffanie Lindgren ’10

Part of the Mososaur fossil found and excavated by the Anderson family.

For more than a decade, Bethel biology professor Bryan Anderson C ‘91, his wife Laura Anderson C ’91, and their three children, Steve, Jeni, and Becky, traveled as often as they could to a remote area in western Kansas to visit relatives and look for fossils. Eight years ago, those long trips were rewarded when Laura discovered the vertebrae of a fossil sticking out of an eroded hill.

The family spent the next eight years unearthing a nearly whole fossil skeleton of a 12-foot-long Mososaur, a marine reptile. Only one tooth from the skull was found. The rest of the skull was most likely eroded away as the neck was sticking out of the earth.

“It’s the thrill of discovery. Just think about holding something 80 million years old. That’s an element of God, the timelessness, and to God it is just a blink of an eye,” said Bryan.

Part of the Mososaur fossil found by the Anderson family.

A Mososaur is not a dinosaur, because it was not a land-dwelling creature. They are thought to have been ambush predators that swam with a snake-like side-to-side motion. Scientists think Mososaurs were the dominant predator of the late-Cretaceous period with some stretching more than 50 feet in length. Mososaur means “Meuse Reptile,” named after the Meuse River in the Netherlands, where the first Mososaur was discovered.

The Andersons found the Mososaur fossil in an extremely remote area called Hell’s Canyon in the Smoky Hill chalk of the Niobrara formation in western Kansas. “If it rained, we couldn’t get there, even when we had traveled 750 miles,” Bryan said. Another problem is that chalk, also called siltstone, is very loose and breakable. Very soft rock makes it hard to get the whole fossil intact with all three wings for each vertebra. The bones had also been compressed and distorted by the compaction of sediment that formed the rock in which they were found.

The Andersons transported the Mososaur—carefully wrapped in bubble wrap, crumpled newspaper, and towels—in their family van to the Science Museum of Minnesota. The museum’s Philip W. Fitzpatrick Chair of Paleontology Bruce Erickson preserved and catalogued the fossil. Serendipitously, Erickson specializes in Mososaurs.

Anderson family doing excavation work in Kansas.

Bryan said, “This fossil adds to our knowledge of the types and distribution of Mososaurs and the layers of strata in which they are found.” Fossils are a natural extension of Bryan’s academic interests in geology. He teaches Geology, Earth/Space Science, Natural Resources, Human Biology, and Cross Country Skiing at Bethel. “Having an applied element to one’s field is absolutely essential,” said Bryan. “You want to be looking into new materials in the field that you are teaching.”