The artifact is the first find of such a plan, made in the Arctic.
Such a scientific discovery can be called truly sensational. Many scientists have tried to find the remains of dinosaurs outside the Arctic Circle. But it was the St. Petersburg polar explorer who was lucky, who, moreover, turned out to be a freelance correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda, whose cycle of materials under the general title Notes of a Polar Explorer we published for the last three months.
The scientist himself describes how he discovered the precious remains very simply.
- I'm a mushroom picker to the core. Let it stay ten meters from the house, but I will still look under my feet. It was the same that day. We are leaving the hike, and then I saw in the bed of an almost dry river a stone of an unusual shape - large in size, but very strange, - shares his impressions a researcher at the St. Petersburg Institute of the Arctic and Antarctic, our freelance correspondent Andrey Tyuryakov. - I decided to stop and take a closer look.
After consulting with colleagues, the polar explorer took the find with him to St. Petersburg. Throughout the trip, the stone lay in the hangar and was of little interest to scientists. And then it fell into the hands of employees of the Zoological Museum of the Russian Academy of Sciences. And then it started.
- They not only made me happy, but stunned me. According to preliminary estimates, my find turned out to be priceless - not just a stone, but two fossilized vertebrae of a plesiosaur - a fossil aquatic animal that lived 190-65 million years ago, - Andrey Tyuryakov happily brags. - This is the first find of fossil remains on Wrangel Island. And I'm proud, I'm just happy that I discovered her after being on the island for only a week. No one has ever found anything like it here. That's cool! I am the first!
Presumably found parts of the skeleton belong to a plesiosaur that lived in ancient seas. Now the find is being studied by specialists of the Zoological Museum.
This is what the vertebra of a plesiosaur looks like. Photo: Andrey TURYAKOV.
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REFERENCE
Plesiosaurs (lat. Plesiosauria) are a detachment of fossil reptiles that lived from the Triassic to the Cretaceous (about 199.6-65.5 million years ago). The heyday fell on the Jurassic - early Cretaceous periods.
Plesiosaurs were perfectly adapted to life in water bodies, although they had to surface to the surface to breathe air. They had four limbs converted to flippers, and a barrel-shaped body. Some had long necks and small heads, while others had short necks and huge heads. Lived in saltwater reservoirs - seas and oceans.
ILYA GORBUNOV