The purported discovery was in 2021, near the height of COVID related travel curtailments. Few saw the original site / find (and almost no independent party actually witnessed the “excavation“, physically) before the claim was published. [But to be fair, some cohort of miners / mine owners, not scientists. . . may have “salted” the find, and then called the scientist team in. That is, we will likely never know — exactly — how it came to be.]

And as I indicate below the pull-quote, I must note that it is Elon Musk that has put me in mind of this story, I saw early on Sunday, anew.

In any event, the guy at right was likely not found at the bottom of a phosphate mine, in Morocco. Whatever this jaw-bone was, it unlikely belonged to the monster at right. Here’s the story, from LiveScience:

…A mosasaur species with saw-like teeth that was described by scientists in 2021 may have been based on forged fossils, and researchers are now calling for CT scans to determine the creature’s origin….

The scientists behind the original study described the species, named Xenodens calminechari, from a partial jaw bone and four sharp teeth unearthed in a phosphate mine in Morocco’s Khouribga province. Those teeth prompted the team in 2021 to make claims about its uniqueness, and these are key to the doubts raised in the new study, which was published Dec. 16, 2024, in the journal The Anatomical Record.

Mosasaurs were predatory marine reptiles that dominated the oceans during the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago). They were hugely diverse, reaching lengths of between 10 and 50 feet (3 to 15 meters) feet. They also had varying tooth shapes befitting their different diets. The 2021 team claimed that X. calminechari had “small, short, bladelike teeth packed together to form a saw-like cutting edge….”

Two of the mosasaur’s closely-packed teeth sit in one tooth socket. This conflicts with all other known mosasaur species, in which each tooth has its own socket, according to the new study. Rather than being constructed out of bone from the jaw, tooth sockets are “made by bone that develops from the tooth itself. Each tooth crown makes its own house,” said study co-author Michael Caldwell, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Alberta. In other words, there should be only one tooth per socket.

Mosasaurs “replaced their teeth continuously throughout their lives,” he told Live Science. “Every time one of these teeth is resorbed and falls out, there’s a huge pit left over. And that’s because the next tooth is coming into that hole to build all that tissue back up again so that it’s firmly anchored in the jaw.”

Additionally, rather than sitting flush within the jaw, two of the teeth also appear to have a little material, or “medial overlap,” extending over them on one side. That overlap shouldn’t be there in normal mosasaur tooth development. “The fact that there’s that medial overlap is a huge indicator” of a possible forgery, study co-author Mark Powers, PhD candidate at the University of Alberta [said]….

In a book I’m reading (my original artwork — at right — on it) there was a line from an archeologist that here applies — she said something to the effect that “academic battles in archeology are fought very fiercely — in no small part because the rewards are so very… small.” She compared these sorts of battles to anything Musk might battle in a business boardroom or court for… as “electron microscope level” by comparison. I think she may well not be wrong.

And the book, to be fair, is science fiction [a book about a 300 million year old metal burial chamber, covered in symbols, found embedded about 300 feet into a crater-wall, on Barsoom — perhaps also faked, in the telling of this author] — but I expect the quote from the unnamed archeologist… is not wholly-invented.

नमस्ते