SPOKANE — Suciasaurus rex, a meat-eating predator that lived about 88 million years ago, may soon be the official state dinosaur, thanks to eons of geologic upheaval, a chance discovery and some civic engagement by elementary school students.
Regardless of whether the Legislature sees fit to bestow that official designation, Suciasaurus is the state’s only dinosaur — at least in terms of having some fossilized part of an extinct reptile found within the boundaries of Washington.
A forerunner of the better known Tyrannousaurus rex, which often gets starring roles in movies such as “Jurassic Park,” Suciasaurus was smaller and lived about 15 million years earlier. Unlike T. rex, it doesn’t have an official species name but rather a nickname derived from Sucia Island, the place where the fossilized remnant of its upper femur, or thigh bone, was found eight years ago.
In the peer-reviewed scientific paper on the fossil, its name is “indeterminate theropod dinosaur,” said Christian Sidor, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Washington’s Burke Museum. Theropods are a family of dinosaurs that include T. rex and the velociraptor and eventually evolved into birds.
“It’s a relative to Tyrannosaurus rex, probably,” Sidor said. “People want to put a name on it.”
Suciasaurus got “rex” added to its name — Latin for “king” — when it starred on a T-shirt for the museum.
Whether you call it Suciasaurus or indeterminate theropod, it is the first and so far only dinosaur fossil found in Washington. The odds are pretty good it could be the last because of the geologic and geographic circumstances surrounding its location and discovery, which also relied on some lucky timing.
When Suciasaurus was running around feasting on slower plant-eating dinosaurs during the Late Cretaceous Period — the Jurassic Period was about 100 million years earlier, despite what Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg want you to believe — what is now Washington was under water.
“We just don’t have the right types of rocks,” Sidor said.
Suciasaurus lived — and died — in a coastal area somewhere between the current location of Baja, Mexico and Northern California. It likely died somewhere along the coast, its body may have been washed out into shallow water where much of it fell apart or was carried off and eaten. But a portion of thigh bone settled onto the sea floor.
In 2012, a pair of Burke Museum researchers were walking along a beach on the island looking for fossilized sea creatures. They spotted something they recognized as a small section of some type of fossilized bone embedded in rock. They marked the location, and a crew returned a month later with a permit, excavated the fossil and took it to the museum for study. Not long after, a landslide covered that area of the shoreline. So if the fossil hadn’t been found and excavated by then, it would have been buried and remained in the rocks.
After several years of research, Sidor and UW graduate student Brandon Peecock wrote about the discovery of the first dinosaur fossil in Washington.
