Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 June 1895 — Skeleton of a Huge Sea Animal. [ARTICLE]

Skeleton of a Huge Sea Animal.

The fossil skeleton of a huge sea animal was recently discovered by a settler in the Cherokee strip while

searching for driftwood along the Arkansas river. The nose or beak was projecting from the sand, and on breaking it was found to be bone. This aroused the finder's cariosity to such an extent that he set to work to exhame the skeleton. The head, beak, a few vertebrae, some ribs and propellors were in a fair state of preservation, bat the remainder crumbled as soon as exposed to the air. It has been named by local scientists monocerosichthyosaurus and plesiosaurus, but it evidently belongs to neither. The eye sockets are four feet in diameter, with a supreorbital notch, the same as in the human cranium, with a space of twenty inches between the sockets, making a skull diameter of nine feet and eight inches It has a pointed face or bill twelve feet long, and a comparatively small brain cavity. The vertebrae measure twelve inches each way, and the distance from tip to tip of transverse processes is forty inches, and resembles those of a mammal rather than those of a fish. The ostryodes is thirtyeight inches long. A rib is thirteen feet eight inches long and thirtythree inches in circumference, and two triangular-shaped bones, corresponding to right and left, are 84 by 12 feet, the use of which is conjectural, but supposed to be propellors or fins. Its lengtn has been variously estimated to be from sixty to 800 feet.