L and C--the mysterious beast

Think Nessie, that hugely mysterious reptile thought to lurk in the dismal depths of Scotland's scariest inland sea, Loch Ness. Think Nessie, even though most authorities call her or him more myth than monster.

What I'm saying is, if you need an image of a plesiosaurus, a four-flippered behemoth incapable of moving around much out of the water, but a greatly talented swimmer--if you need to imagine what a plesiosaur might look like, think Nessie.

A plesiosaurus was not a myth but a rightful citizen of the animal world during the later Jurassic era, maybe 200 million years ago, a truly senior citizen.

Diet?--clams and anything else they might catch in the water. Their teeth were needle-like, preposterous, and plentiful, especially out front where, like unimaginable buck teeth, they fanned out wide and high enough to reach out, grab, and devour the same with a bite force of 33,000 pound-force-per-square-inch, the mightiest bite force of any known animal, some researchers claim.

In the early years of the 19th century, an English schoolgirl named Mary Anning became one of the world's most famous paleontologists by digging up all kinds wonders from the cliffs along the English Channel, County of Dorset. Just for the record, Ms. Anning grew up dirt poor; she and one brother were, of ten children, the only siblings to survive childhood. She had little or no education. But already when she was just five or six years old, her father would take her on hikes with the expressed purpose of finding fossils, and then sell them where he could. Her father died when she was still a child, but Little Mary got hooked on fossils.

Truth be told, Mary Anning's frequent fossil forays weren't all that unique. Among well-to-do English gentlemen and ladies, keeping a few fossils on display in the parlor was highly fashionable, odd as that may seem. In her haunts along the channel, Mary Anning kept digging up age-old treasures to peddle where and when she could--including, in 1823, the discovery of what most paleontologists now call the very first plesiosaur, a giant reptile-like creature that, just then, had no name.

It was huge--as was the story. Soon enough, the bones were hauled off to the London Geological Society, where a French scholar named George Cuvier, "the father of paleontology," assessed the dusty old things and called it a hoax, which it wasn't. Sometime later Professor Cuvier repented for his paleontological sins.

By the way, despite a long series of contributions to science in general and paleontology in specific, during her lifetime, Mary Anning, researcher extraordinaire, was not admitted to the Geological Society. She was, after all, a woman.

And now, you're asking yourself, why on earth is he going on endlessly about Jurrasic Park?

You're not going to believe this, but if you take a pontoon up the Missouri--go ahead, grab a beer and take your sun lotion--and you get somewhere up above Ft. Randall dam, hug the west side of Lake Francis Case, somewhere there in Gregory County, South Dakota, and have a close look around. An ocean away from the cliffs of Dover and twenty years before Mary Anning found the first one, Meriweather Lewis and George Clark and the Corps of Discovery unearthed something they had no clue how to identify or what to name.

On September 10, 1804, George Whitehouse, the only private to keep a diary, noted the Corps' impossible discovery this way: "We landed and saw lying on the banks on the South side of the River, the Bones of a monstrous large Fish, the backbone of which measured, forty-five feet long."

That's it. William Clark could spend a gallon of ink describing a prairie dog. He killed off and had stuffed several specimens of the animal world he knew would enthrall his friend Jefferson and might just end up in the President's front room. But what must be the most amazing discovery of the entire trip over more than half the continent apparently merited little more than what I've just read. A forty-five foot backbone embedded in stone.

Mary Anning wouldn't discover hers for another twenty years. 

Don't blame them. The Corps of Discovery would have had no way of identifying this "monstrous large Fish." The word plesiosaurus, as yet did not exist, not even in the most prestigious English paleontology journals.

The entire crew slack-jawed happened quite often, I'm sure. But this one--"what on earth is it?" They had no clue. Think of the entire bunch speechless right there in Gregory County, South Dakota.

If you think Nessie, it's not so hard to believe.