Eighty million years ago, the central United States was a hotbed of dinosaur activity. The regions of present-day Wyoming and Colorado were ideally conducive for the “terrible lizards” to flourish and survive, from the behemoth leaf-eating Brachiosaurus to the towering carnivorous Tyrannosaurus rex. A formation of sedimentary rocks known as the Morrison Formation was also an ideal setting for their bones to be preserved as fossils, making the American Midwest the perfect place to go dinosaur hunting.
Further northwest, the state of Washington was far different eighty million years. Instead of a terrain suitable for dinosaurs like Wyoming, the region was underwater, making both past and present day dinosaur hunting an exercise in futility. Despite the odds, two paleontologists from the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Washington in Seattle uncovered a genuine dinosaur fossil on May 18, 2012.
The discovery occurred on Sucia Island, located off the coast of Washington near the Canadian border. It is believed that the rocks forming the island were originally located as far south as Mexico during the Age of Dinosaurs. While the fossil itself may not have originated in Washington, however, the state has embraced it as their own just the same.
“If you’ve been to the San Juan Islands, you know there are a lot of rocky, low-lying beaches,” Brandon Peecook – one of the two paleontologists – explained of the discovery. “When the tide goes out you have huge expanses that get exposed, and then very steep cliffs right at the edge of the beach. The fossil was on a beach like that, ten or fifteen feet away from cliff, right at the high tide line. There were barnacles living on the bone. We got off the boat and right away I said, this is not a marine reptile. It was just too big, and when we looked at the specimen there was a tube of mud infilling what in life was a hollow cavity. It has hollow bones and it’s eighty million years old? Uh… it has to be a dinosaur. I was sold right away.”
The fossil that Peecook and Christian Sidor uncovered on Sucia Island was not from a Brachiosaurus or Tyrannosaurus rex – it wasn’t even it a full skeleton but a partial left femur measuring 16.7 inches long and 8.7 inches wide – but a dinosaur nonetheless. Upon returning to the Burke Museum and comparing the fragment to complete dinosaur femurs in the museum’s collection, Peecook and Sidor concluded that the full femur would have been three feet long, slightly smaller than that of a T. Rex.
The pair of paleontologists also determined that the femur was from a theropod – bipedal dinosaurs that include the Velociraptor and T. Rex – due to the hollow middle cavity and signs that the bone had been connected close to the hip. “This fossil won’t win a beauty contest,” Christian Sidor admitted. “But fortunately it preserves enough anatomy that we were able to compare it to other dinosaurs and be confident of its identification.”
“The fossil record of the West Coast is very spotty when compared to the rich record of the interior of North America,” Brandon Peecook added. “This specimen, though fragmentary, gives us insight into what the West Coast was like eighty million years ago, plus it gets Washington into the dinosaur club.”
The specimen is too old to be that of a Tyrannosaurus rex, but after studying other dinosaur fossils at the Museum of the Rockies in Montana, Peecook concluded that it was from the same family, probably a distant cousin. Additional research at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta further confirmed his hypothesis when comparisons with another member of the tyrannosaurid family – Daspletosaurus torosus – proved to be a “dead ringer.”
The Daspletosaurus was native to Alberta, however, making the Washington discovery a potential new species, but the lack of additional bones prevents the discovery from being formally named. Brandon Peecook believes that the Washington dinosaur probably died near a river and was then washed towards the Pacific Ocean, where the femur lodged along the shoreline. Other remnants either didn’t make it that far or were carried out to sea.
None of which prevented the fossil from earning a nickname – Suciasaurus rex, after Sucia Island where it was uncovered. In 2019, students at the Elmhurst Elementary School in Tacoma, Washington, even petitioned the state legislature to formally declare the Suciasaurus rex as the official state dinosaur. Washington already has a state fossil, the Columbian mammoth, while nine states and the District of Columbia have official dinosaurs. As of 2022, the legislation was still pending, although many representatives continued to push for its passage, if for no other reason than to show high school students that their voices are heard in the state capitol.
Now if only the Suciasaurus rex could add its own roar to the debate…
Anthony Letizia