Dinosaur Find in Pacific Northwest

Eyes pinned to the ground, fossil hunters Greg Kovalchuk and Mike Kelly were searching Central Oregon's dusty crevices for mollusk fossils late last summer when Kelly saw it.

On a spot on Bureau of Land Management land near Prineville was a jagged rock marked with a white triangle. Kelly instantly knew it was a tooth. Nearby, he found a black and bone-colored cone-shaped tooth with striations and enamel.

Twenty feet away on a slope, Kovalchuk spotted a piece of jawbone sticking out of the dirt.

The earth was spilling 100 million-year-old secrets from a time when dinosaurs prowled on land and reptiles slithered in and out of oceans.

The self-trained paleontologists found what is believed to be the first remains of a marine reptile called the plesiosaur that has been found in the Pacific Northwest.

It is also thought to be only the third vertebrate fossil uncovered in the area so far from a rock formation that dates back to the Cretaceous period, the last of the three periods of the Dinosaur Age..........

Read the Rest: from The Bulletin