Mosasaur

Dr. Caldwell just let me start studying a mosasaur braincase that's on loan from the Royal Tyrrell. It's gorgeous! Whoever did the prep work did an awesome job. I'm not too pleased about the copious amounts of glue that obviously had to be used, but it's still an awesome specimen. The only down side is that the exists for the cranial nerves don't seem to have scaled up proportionately with skull so it won't be easy to assess the characters. Also, there are couple things I didn't realize about mosasaurs: first of all, the teeth that they have on their pterygoid extend all the way back to the contact with basipterygoid process on the basisphenoid. Second, they had piddlingly small brains. We're talking about a 25 foot long, multi-ton carnivorous reptile with a brain that, if you were to bend the olfactory lobe/nerve around, would have fit very comfortably in the palm of my hand. These things were dumber than mud! I thought that iguanas had small brains, but compared to mosasaurs, it's huge! Ok, I should probably consider that if I were to compare brain size to body size on the log scale that I'm supposed to, it would come out more equitably, but justlooking at it, one gets a really bad impression of mosasaur brain power.