In 1988, on the banks of the Puntledge River on Vancouver Island, a strange fossil began to emerge from the stone. It was long, with an almost serpentine neck, the skeleton of what seemed to be a marine predator from the age of dinosaurs. For decades, the fossil confounded paleontologists. Now, it finally has a name: Traskasaura sandrae.
This newly described creature was a kind of elasmosaur — a subgroup of plesiosaurs known for their long necks and aquatic adaptations. But Traskasaura wasn’t just another sea monster. It was plain weird.
“It was a very weird-looking animal,” Professor F. Robin O’Keefe, a paleontologist at Marshall University and lead author of the study, told BBC Science Focus. “The fact that it had some very odd traits made it basically impossible for researchers at the time to decide what it was and who it was related to.”
A Fossil Reexamined
The original skeleton, though strikingly complete, was degraded on one side. O’Keefe likened it to “melted ice cream.” It wasn’t until a second, juvenile fossil was uncovered decades later that the picture came into focus. This smaller, exquisitely preserved skeleton helped confirm the strange features of the original and made it possible to recognize Traskasaura as a new genus and species.
The name is a tribute to the people and place that first brought it to light. “Traskasaura” honors Michael and Heather Trask, who discovered the holotype specimen in 1988. The species name, sandrae, memorializes Sandra Lee O’Keefe, a family member of the lead author and a breast cancer advocate.
Even before this formal identification, the fossils held a place in public imagination. In 2018, they won 48% of the vote in a province-wide poll and were later declared the official fossil emblem of British Columbia. Today, they reside at the Courtenay and District Museum and Paleontology Centre.
Evolution’s Outlier
Traskasaura sandrae is unlike any plesiosaur known to science. Measuring about 12 meters long, it had robust, sharp teeth and a neck with at least 50 vertebrae. But it’s the shoulders and flippers that truly set it apart.
“The shoulder, in particular, is unlike any other plesiosaur I have ever seen, and I have seen a few,” O’Keefe said. The shoulder girdle opens downward, and the flippers are shaped like inverted airplane wings — with the more curved surface on the underside. This anatomy made Traskasaura well-suited for swimming downward.
That may sound like a small detail. But it has big implications.
While most marine reptiles hunt by looking up — silhouetting their prey against the light — Traskasaura appears to have taken the opposite approach.
“If you think about reptiles swimming around in the water, light always comes from above, so animals tend to hunt upwards,” said O’Keefe. “This animal didn’t do that.”
Its anatomy suggests it dove down onto prey from above, a rare hunting style in marine reptiles. It likely preyed on ammonites — coiled, shelled relatives of squid and octopuses that were abundant in the Late Cretaceous. With powerful jaws and teeth built for crushing, Traskasaura would have been well-equipped to crack open their armor.
Despite its size and unique features, Traskasaura wasn’t at the top of the food chain. It likely had to watch out for bigger predators, like mosasaurs.
“It was big, but it didn’t have a very big neck or head,” O’Keefe noted. “So if a mosasaur that’s got big teeth got a hold of it, it could have really torn it up.”
More Than Just a Sea Monster
Beyond its physical traits, Traskasaura offers insights into the evolutionary history of plesiosaurs. It combined primitive and advanced features in a way rarely seen, suggesting it evolved along a unique path — perhaps convergently, in isolation, or under unusual environmental pressures.
“When I first saw the fossils and realized they represented a new taxon, I thought it might be related to other plesiosaurs from the Antarctic,” said O’Keefe. “My Chilean colleague Rodrigo Otero thought differently, and he was right; Traskasaura is a strange, convergently evolved, fascinating beast.”
Its existence in the waters of what is now British Columbia also highlights how rich and diverse marine ecosystems were during the Late Cretaceous. Today, the Pacific Northwest is famed for its orcas, sea lions, and vibrant coastal waters. In the Mesozoic, it was home to marine reptiles just as wondrous.
“With the naming of Traskasaura sandrae, the Pacific Northwest finally has a Mesozoic reptile to call its own,” said O’Keefe. “Fittingly, a region known for its rich marine life today was host to strange and wonderful marine reptiles in the Age of Dinosaurs.”
And like many of its oceanic contemporaries, Traskasaura vanished with the mass extinction 66 million years ago — swept away, as O’Keefe puts it, when “an asteroid hits and kills off all the big animals.”
The Mystery, Finally Solved
This story began with a fossil in a riverbank and a question no one could quite answer. More than three decades later, Traskasaura sandrae stands as a reminder of what patient science — and a little bit of luck — can reveal.
“The fossil record is full of surprises,” said O’Keefe. “It is always gratifying to discover something unexpected.”
Now, British Columbia’s provincial fossil has a name, a story, and a place in the grand narrative of life on Earth.
The findings appeared in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology.
