Skull is new species | Tulsa World

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Tulsan Tony Morris may get his name on the new species he uncovered in 2005.

Robert Reisz of the University of Toronto and Tony Morris look over Morris' collection of fossils before a rock club meeting at Furr's cafeteria on Jan. 12. Morris found a skull that Reisz identified as a new species. TOM GILBERT/Tulsa World

By MICHAEL OVERALL World Staff Writer
Published: 1/26/2009 2:20 AM
Last Modified: 1/26/2009 3:13 AM

The temperature hit 102 degrees that day, with the breeze refusing to blow and a relentless sun glaring off the bare limestone of an old quarry in southern Oklahoma.

Tony Morris was digging through a pile of rubble with a busload of other amateur paleontologists from the Tulsa Rock and Mineral Society.

And they were finding a lot of dinosaur bones — most no bigger than a fingernail, easily mistaken for just another rock if they didn't know what they were looking for.

After a hundred years of blasting and tunneling and strip mining, the fossils are literally strewn across the ground here — sometimes so easy to find that all Morris had to do was look down.

"There was a skull just lying in the road, right there," he remembers. "I just bent over and picked it up."

That's why Morris and his friends liked to take field trips to this quarry, six miles north of Lawton — for the easy pickings. But they were always common fossils, seen hundreds of times before, and of no scientific interest.

Until July 23, 2005.

With 30 to 40 other people exploring nearby, Morris stumbled into a rock about the size of a shoebox, with a single row of teeth protruding from one edge.

"Anyone of us could've found it," he says. "I just happened to be the one."

Back home in Coweta, after getting off work as an accountant during the day, Morris spent nights meticulously chipping away at the rock with a dental pick.

It took a month

for the whole skull to emerge. Then Morris began researching what it might be.

"I found several things that looked similar," Morris says, "but nothing exactly like it."

Nearly a year after finding the bones, he began corresponding with an expert in Italy, who put him in touch with a professor at the University of Toronto — Robert Reisz, chairman of the department of biology and senior editor for the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Now, after another three years of research, Reisz is ready to announce his conclusion: Morris' fossil marks an entirely new species, previously unknown to scientists.

Living 280 million years ago, the animal was a type of "Cacops," a lizard-like creature that measured roughly a foot long — not exactly a terrifying image from "Jurassic Park."

But with body armor and a disproportionately large skull, it would've looked menacing, says Reisz, who came to Tulsa on Jan. 12 to speak at a banquet in Morris' honor.

"Kind of like a crocodile with a big head," he says.

Later this year, Reisz plans to publish a report about the new species. And he expects the Royal Society of London to name it after Morris — perhaps "Cacops Morrisi," or something similar.

"It's taken a long time — more than three years — to get this far," says Morris, who donated the skull to the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History in Norman. "But it's been exciting."

Officials have closed the quarry, limiting access to Reisz and his team of researchers, who hope to find more parts from the fossil. Even Morris can't go back there anymore.

But he and the rest of the Tulsa Rock and Mineral Society have other places to look. And who knows what they'll find next?

"I like the age of it," Morris says. "You find this thing and pick it up, and that's the first time that eyes have been set on it for, say, 80 million years. That's amazing."

Michael Overall 581-8383
michael.overall@tulsaworld.com

By MICHAEL OVERALL World Staff Writer

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