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casting techniques, skilled technicians at the Tyrell created a hard-plastic
cast of a large skull, teeth and all. Not content merely to munch nautilus
shells, however, the masters of verisimilitude at the Tyrell did our experi-
ments one (or several) better: They took their mosasaur head to the Philip-
pine Islands and tried it out on living nautiluses in the sea.
I can only imagine the looks the Filipino customs agents must have
given this grotesque bit of carry-on luggage. And it is a good thing that the
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals didn't get wind of this lit-
tle gig. The chutzpah was amazing. And who came up with the money for
this? In any event, off they went, and sure enough, mosasaurs could certainly
break into shells, but making little cookie cutter holes in these shells was not
in their ancient repertoire.
What can we say to end this story? I have been a bit unfair to Erie.
Ironically, I think Erie Kauffman was right for the wtong reasons. Did
mosasaurs eat ammonites? No current evidence suggests that they did. The
bite story as originally devised, and then latet amended by Erie, is clearly im-
plausible. But I happen to believe the mosasaurs
did
eat ammonites. Am-
monites, aftet all, were among the most abundant and commonly encoun-
tered food resources in the Cretaceous oceans. It is ahsutd not to assume that
large carnivorous vertebrates then (as now) relished cephalopod meals. The
elaborately ornamented ammonite shells, especially among larger species,
were probably effective designs to thwart smaller predators, such as most
fish. Mosasaurs, however, could have been highly efficient ammonite eaters.
The only problem—for us paleontologists—is that such attacks would
never
have left any sort of identifiable mark in the shells, other than a few cracks.
Such shells, after attack, would have been no more than a few calcareous
shards drifting to an uncertain fossilization at the bottom of the sea. Who
would recognize such fossil fragments as the evidence of an ancient preda-
tory attack ?
Each spring, the eroding cliffs now seem to yield a new marine reptile
from the black shale of Vancouver Island. Sooner or later, I am sure, one of
these wondrous fossils will erode out of Sucia Island as well. It is certain that
mosasaurs great in size and number once roamed the ancient seas of this
