Until recently, the U.S. housed 36 states that have produced dinosaur fossils. Now, among the pristine beaches of the San Juan Islands, researchers and paleontologists have unearthed a near-unearthly finding: they have dug up the first dinosaur bones of the West Coast off the shores of the far northwestern corner of Washington state.
Details: the excavation of the dinosaur fossils
The fossil was found buried on marine rock on Sucia Island, the largest of the San Juan archipelago islands of Washington, by a team from Seattle’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. The specimen was once a Theropod (Greek for “beast feet”), an ancestrally carnivorous and ravenous creature. Theropods include the Tyrannosaurus rex and the Velociraptor, and are also commonly linked to the evolution of the earliest birds.
The interior of North America has historically had a much better track record of supplying dinosaur fossils, unlike the West Coast. Although incomplete, the fossil of the dinosaur specimen shines a light on what the West Coast looked like 80 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous period.
The fossil was first seen in May 2012 near a marine state park on Sucia Island by a museum research team, which at the time was on a mission to collect ammonite fossils. In the three years that followed, the team embarked on a tireless process to unearth, unshackle, catalog and, finally, to verify and detail the fossil and its origins.
A look at the Theropod: one of the last remaining dinosaur fossils to be found
The fossil measures 16.7 inches long and 8.7 inches wide. Because it is fragmentary, the team wasn’t able to correctly classify its exact family or species. However, the fossil was compared to several different fossils of the same age at other museums, and it was recognized to have the upper thigh of a carnivorous dinosaur. Its complete femur would have been over three feet long, a little smaller than that of a Tyrannosaurus rex.
Because a great deal of additional information is needed to correctly identify and catalog the specimen, the most we know for now is that the dinosaur classifies as a Theropod that lived during the Late Cretaceous. Whatever the case, it looks like Washington will almost certainly be the last state in which a dinosaur fossil will be unearthed. The remaining 13 states that have never turned up a fossil probably never will — Hawaii, for instance, is only a pale 6 million years old. Other states, including Louisiana and Florida, were completely underwater during that era, making fossils improbable to find. Other states in the northeast have had their rocks carved off by glaciers long ago.
