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A Sea Monster Surfaces

-By Kathryn R. Hoffman

Dig, dig. scrape, scrape. for nearly five hours, college students Sarah Kee and Kevin Morgan chiseled away at a patch of soil near a busy interstate highway in Fayetteville, Arkansas. They were after a three-foot-long fossil. Instead, they found one more than twice that size! "We got three feet uncovered and saw it was going to be much larger," Kee told TFK. "We started to get excited."

Kee and Morgan, both 22, called their friend Jonathan Gillip to help. In all, it took the University of Arkansas students 24 hours to unearth their find. It proved to be an eight-foot-long prehistoric nautiloid fossil. It is the biggest of its kind ever found!

The fossil is 325 million years old. It lived during the Mississippian era, when much of the southern U.S. was covered by a shallow sea. The ancient creature belongs to a large category of marine mollusks called cephalopod (sef-uh-luh-pod), meaning "head-foot." A distant cousin of the squid, it is more closely related to the nautilus, a sea animal that lives in a chambered shell.

Since their January 20 discovery, Kee and Morgan have been studying the fossil with geology professor Walter Manger. It is in very good shape and should provide important clues to how the creature lived. The students want to figure out why the nautiloid was so large. They will also try to learn why the thicker tip of its shell is broken off. A similarly large nautiloid fossil found in 1963 was missing the same piece.

Most scientists don't make a significant fossil find until they've worked in the field for years. These students have an early start. "This was completely unexpected," says Morgan. "It hasn't sunk in yet."

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