VICTORIA MARTINEZ
Senior News Editor

A new dinosaur is swimming through the sky of the Natural Sciences Museum, dangerously close to the T-Rex’s jaws.

The mosasaur, a cretateous-era reptilian is Saskatchewan born and built. Its remainders — only a skull and spine — were dug up in the shale near Gardiner Dam more than 50 years ago, where it lived in the sea that covered the province 70 million years ago.

The Royal Saskatchewan Museum excavated the mosasaur remains and they’ve been collecting dust in boxes since.

Over the years, students would periodically try their hand at the project, but nothing came of it.

“Nobody was really quite up to the task until Evan Nordquist came to my door,” said Brian Pratt, professor of paleontology at the U of S. He gave Nordquist the go-ahead to build the ancient lizard himself.

The U of S paleobiology grad took on the project for his own interest, working weekends for two years at minimum wage. In all, he spent more than 250 hours over two years creating the model by hand.

“I saw it in a box. It was like ‘Oh my God!’ That’s a mosasaur — that’s what I worked on in Manitoba,” said Nordquist. He had worked on mosasaur excavations over summers in his home province.

Combined with his familiarity with the dinosaur, the project required extraordinary passion and patience.

First, he had to replicate the bones.

He went to Regina to photograph the bones, which amounted to thousands of shots from every angle. These images he cross referenced with previously documented images of bones — humerus to humerus, for example — to determine the life-size measurements.

To get the right sizes, Nordquist would take the images to a copier. “I’d have them blown up, this one 331 per cent, this one 207 per cent,” he explained.

Finally, he’d carve the bones from styrofoam, and create properly sized fillers for missing bones. The carving he did mostly with sandpaper in order to get the proportions and shapes exactly right.

When it came to assembly, Nordquist had to get creative. “The thing is not designed to walk on the ground. I had to support it in the air somehow.” So he borrowed a coatrack from the geology loading bay, but they made him give it back. Next, he tried out tripods.

The mosasaur model crashed off the tripods and shattered. And this wasn’t the only time all his work was lost.

“The whole thing has shattered like three times,” Nordquist laughed.

He eventually propped his dinosaur on a couple of ladders, and got plenty of practice stringing the bone pieces together.

Finally finished, the mosasaur is the first major addition in over 20 years to the Natural Sciences Museum in the biology building. The space is used both for public interest and hands-on learning for U of S students.

This dinosaur will be particularly interesting, historically, as one of the earliest dinosaur species discovered. The first mosasaur was found in 1764 in Holland.

“Early naturalists could begin to understand the fossil record,” said geology professor Brian Pratt.

Its importance will live on as a teaching tool and a part of Saskatchewan geological legacy.

Mosasaur

Mosa – Latin for Meuse River, where it was discovered
Saurus – Greek for lizard

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image: Pete Yee