“Jurassic World” at Georgia Southern

June 24, 2015

A creature close to the heart of the Georgia Southern University Museum is getting some significant attention thanks to the summer blockbuster “Jurassic World.” The Museum’s first-ever cataloged fossil, the mosasaur, has been dwelling in the Hall of Natural History since the 1980s after it was excavated by Georgia Southern paleontologists in South Dakota, and brought back here. It is considered the Museum’s “mascot” said Brent Tharp, Ph.D., director of the Museum. So naturally, Tharp was excited to see the mosasaur play such a prominent role in the “Jurassic” movie. “Mosasaurs have been in movies at different times in roles, and this newest one is just a great opportunity for the public to imagine how these animals moved, what their behavior might have been like and to bring it to life,” he said. “So then it’s a good opportunity to come see the real mosasaur, really get a good perspective of its size by standing right next to it versus seeing it on film, and learn a little more about this animal along with so many others that used to be swimming in these ancient oceans in Georgia.” Curator of Paleontology and Professor of Geology Katy Smith explained that although often referred to as a dinosaur, the mosasaur is actually a marine reptile that lived toward the end of the Cretaceous Period, which is about 80-65 million years ago. “The mosasaur would have been the top predator in its environment. It would have eaten everything that it could have gotten its hands on anywhere from a sea turtle to sharks--even other smaller mosasaurs,” she said. While the Georgia Southern mosasaur, scientifically called Tylosaurus proriger, is considered one of the largest mosasaurs measuring at about 26 feet, or the length of a school bus, the mosasaur in “Jurassic World” is Mosasaurus, a different species than the one at the Museum, Smith said. “The mosasaur in the movie would be the largest known mosasaur, which could have gotten up to about 59 feet so we would expect the mosasaur in the movie to be a bit larger than ours,” she said. “They've Inflated the size a bit, so it’s probably somewhere around 150 to 200 feet, but in terms of its shape and its appearance, it looks pretty much like we would expect our mosasaurs to look like.” While the size may be exaggerated in the movie, there is one specific thing Smith is pleased that the movie portrayed correctly. “One of the most special things I think they put in the movie was that the mosasaur has an extra set of teeth in its throat,” she said. “And if you’ve seen the movie, you see the mosasaur opening up its jaw and you can see that second set of teeth in its throat. So they got that right, the movie did not make that up.” The extra set of teeth would have been part of its feeding strategy, Smith added. Mosasaurs didn’t chew their food, they “grabbed” and “gulped it.” “The extra set of teeth probably helped the prey move down the throat faster and prevented it from escaping in its aquatic environment,” she said. Though she laughed at the notion of keeping a mosasaur in captivity, Smith said she believes the creature could survive in today’s oceans. “The mosasaur, if it lived today, probably would prey on some of the larger things in the ocean, like whales or sharks, and it probably would be okay in the ecosystem today,” she said. “I just wouldn’t put it in a zoo.” Smith hopes that after seeing the movie, spectators will be encouraged to learn more about the creatures in the movie, specifically the mosasaur. “When movies like this come out, I hope that it just sparks people’s interest in the science behind them,” she said. “So this is a monster movie, but the monsters, if you want to call them that, are things that actually lived and we have fossil evidence of these animals. “If you think that beast is cool, come and check out the fossil of it and see what it really looked like, and just try to learn a little bit more about what was living in Georgia before we got here.”