RSU professor uncovers 70 million-year-old fossil, cited in technical journal

CLAREMORE, Okla. — A Rogers State University (RSU) assistant professor has been cited in a scientific research journal after he uncovered a fossil vertebrae while traveling through South Africa.

Dr. Christen Shelton was on an expedition through KwaZulu-Natal in 2016 when he discovered the fossil of a creature called a mosasurus. Only once before in 1901, had a fossil of this creature been discovered within the country.

“I went to school in Texas at Midwestern State University. I got a bachelor’s of science in geology and then I stayed there and got a masters of science in biology,” Shelton said. “Later, I went on to get a Ph.D. in Germany in vertebrate paleontology, with an emphasis in paleo histology, where I looked specifically at the fossil bone tissues of extinct animals.”

Shelton grew up in Ardmore where he was always fascinated with the discovery of fossils and history of extinct creatures.

“We lived out in the country and we had a long gravel driveway that had rock from the Arbuckle Mountains that was quarried out of it,” Shelton said. “I used to go through it and collect fool’s gold, pyrite, calcite, I’d find trilobites in it. But, I knew the word pyrite, calcite, trilobite before I was even in kindergarten just from finding the stuff and then my grandmother and relatives helped me to identify things.”

Shelton said his grandmother would even take him out Lake Murray to look for fossils.

Shelton’s mososaurid discovery was cited in “Unraveling the Taxonomy of the South Africa Mosasaurids.” This article examines the classification of the mosasaurids, which were large aquatic lizards that lived during the Cretaceous period. These creatures inhabited the Atlantic Ocean and fossils have been found in North and South America, Africa, Europe, Asia and Antarctica.

“I keep making a comparison,” he said. “There is a mosasaur in the Jurassic World movie, the first one … that’s like the big one.”

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RSU professor uncovers 70 million-year-old fossil, cited in technical journal (Dr. Christen Shelton)

During Shelton’s time in South Africa, he was working with Anusuya Chinsamy, department head of biological sciences at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and co-author to “Unraveling the Taxonomy of the South Africa Mosasaurids.”

It was during one of Chinsamy’s expeditions that Shelton discovered the fossil.

“I was in South Africa at the University of Cape Town, doing my post-doctoral research, and was there for two years, after completing my Ph.D. in Germany,” Shelton said. “It was during an expedition in 2016 when we were looking for dinosaur remains, which we never found, although we did find some prehistoric Cretaceous turtle remains. But we did find what we believed was the tailbone of what we later learned belonged to a smaller species of the mosasaurs.”

Despite the big prize being the mososaurid vertebrae, Shelton’s group of colleagues also found megalodon teeth and prehistoric whale bones on the expedition.

“I’ve found other fossils, but this was the first time I’d found those belonging to a mosasaurid, which, being that it was only the second time those have been identified in South Africa, was quite a find,” he said. “When we got it [the fossil] out of the ground, we packaged it securely for travel and took it back to UCT with rock and other materials from the dig site, as was allowed, given our permits.

Shelton said it wasn’t an easy task to travel with the fossils.

“There was an incident at the airport, we were trying to check into security. They wouldn’t let us on board with the rocks. They thought we could use them for weapons and we’re like, ‘Oh no, that’s gonna damage the fossils, we’re not gonna do that,’” he said. “So we actually argued with a security lady for a while. She made us go back to the gate. We had to contact the pilots of the plane. They had to then allow us to come into the cockpit with the material, show it to them, they actually thought it was neat. They didn’t think it was dangerous. We had to put it in storage bins in the cockpit with the pilots until we landed back at Cape Town and were allowed to take it out, take it off the plane.”

Despite Shelton’s expeditions slowing down since the pandemic, he said he’d love to get back to it when he is able.

“There’s some places in Oklahoma. There are some quarries around Oklahoma City, some stuff that’s unique to the area that hasn’t been worked in since the 1960s,” he said.

The article co-authored by Chinsamy, Megan Rose Woolley and Michael Wayne Caldwell was published in December 2022 in “Frontiers in Earth Science.”

To read the paper which cites Shelton’s research, click here.

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