UA Museum’s Paleontology Program to be Featured in ‘Dinosaurs Gone South’ May 29 on Turner South Broadcasting

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – A new television episode of Turner South Broadcasting’s series “The Natural South,” will air Saturday, May 29 at 9 a.m., featuring University of Alabama Museum of Natural History volunteer paleontologists at a UA-owned dig site examining Mesozoic-era life, such as the 80-million-year-old gigantic water reptile now on display at the museum.

“Dinosaurs Gone South” will explore the amazing, enormous creatures that roamed and swam through the South millions of years ago, according to James Lamb, a 1994 UA New College graduate considered one of the world’s leading experts on mosasaurs, which were prehistoric water reptiles that he describes as big Komodo dragons with flippers instead of legs.

“Mosasaurs were nasty customers,” said Lamb, who, as a UA student, was heavily involved in the earlier recovery of the now displayed animal while working as a member of the UA museum’s paleontology staff. “If you were in the ocean, you would have been worried about them. They ranged from 9-feet long up to about 50-feet long,” said Lamb, who is now completing his doctorate in vertebrate paleontology at North Carolina State University.

In “Dinosaurs Gone South,” Lamb and volunteers with UA’s Alabama Museum of Natural History, will also examine clues from dinosaur bones and teeth, explore the site where they were found, and discuss studies of the first dinosaur egg with an embryo ever found in the Eastern United States, discovered in 1970 in Alabama.

Dr. Harry Blewitt, a UA professor in chemistry and New College, is an amateur paleontologist who volunteers 2-4 hours per week processing and cataloging the UA museum’s fossil collections.

“I’m a wood carver, so I don’t mind sitting down for two hours and cleaning a little piece of bone.”

Blewitt visited the UA dig site near Selma two weeks before the March filming of “Dinosaurs Gone South” to prepare the site and led the film crew on a tour through the Museum’s collections in Mary Harmon Bryant Hall.

Although mosasaurs once lived around the world, few places make such good mosasaur fossil hunting as does Alabama, Lamb said.

“Alabama, it turns out, is one of the top three places in the world to look for mosasaurs, along with Belgium and Kansas,” Lamb said. In particular, the soft soil of the Black Belt region, which, along with most of south Alabama, once lay underneath the ocean, is ideal, he said.

The Museum’s staffers and volunteers find various fossilized specimens more quickly than they can catalog them, Blewitt said, so the Museum is accepting volunteers to work on various projects. For more information, phone Blewitt at 205/348-4600 or 205/348-5954.

“Dinosaurs Gone South” will air on the following local Turner South channels:

• 68 in Northport, Taylorville, and Brookwood
• 65 in Birmingham (Bright House)
• 73 in Jefferson, Shelby, Hoover, and Walker, and
• 55 in Talladega

To see the 23-foot-long mosasaur on display at UA’s Alabama Museum of Natural History, visit during normal business hours, 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. Admission is $2 for adults and $1 for seniors and children. Guided tours for schools and other groups can be arranged on Tuesdays-Fridays by calling 348-7550.