Futabasaurus
Late Cretaceous, about 85 million years ago; discovered 1968
The long necked skeleton swimming through the air of the third floor gallery is Japan's most famous fossil reptile. Futabasaurus suzukii was a plesiosaur, a marine reptile with a barrel shaped body, four paddle like flippers and a neck that stretched for more than a third of its seven metre length. It lived about eighty five million years ago in the shallow seas that then covered what is now Fukushima Prefecture, hunting fish and squid with the small, sharp teeth you can see in the reconstructed skull.
The story of its discovery is part of the appeal. In 1968 a high school student named Tadashi Suzuki found bones in a riverbank in the Futaba region of Fukushima and reported them to the museum. Excavation revealed one of the most complete plesiosaurs ever found in Japan, and it was displayed here for decades under the nickname Futabasuzukiryu, Suzuki's dragon of Futaba, before scientists formally described it as a new genus and species in 2006, naming it after both the place and the finder. Look at the real bones displayed in cases near the mount, including shark teeth found with the skeleton, evidence that the carcass was scavenged on the sea floor.
Futabasaurus became a celebrity in Japan through the animated film Doraemon: Nobita's Dinosaur, in which a boy raises a baby plesiosaur, and generations of children have looked for it here. The mount shows how the animal moved: notice the huge flat shoulder and hip girdles that anchored the flipper muscles, and the way the neck is held out in a gentle curve rather than raised like a swan's, as older reconstructions wrongly showed.
Did You Know? The fossil was found by a seventeen year old high school student, and the species name suzukii honours him.
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