Mosasaurus in the Netherlands

During the Easter holidays I went to Maastricht and Aachen. Here you have a couple of pictures I shot when we passed by the Natuurhistorisch Museum Maastricht to visit an old pal of mine (the pictures aren't that good and I wasn't in my best times, either) :

Laura, much more affectionate than me, as usual, tried to kiss him ;-p

Our bony friend is a Mosasaurus hoffmani, a marine reptile of the Cretaceous (no, it's not a dinosaur). The generic name, Mosasaurus, means 'reptile of the Meuse', river called Maas in Dutch. The first fossil of this kind of animals was found as long ago as 1780 in a quarry by Maastricht area. In the wikipedia we can find more stuff about the discovery. Doctor Hoffman was a fossil hunter and through his epistolar contacts made public the discovery. When the French revolutionaries occupied the Netherlands, they took the fossil to París, so Cuvier himself was able to study it. The father of Paleontology made the first scientific description of the animal and give it its name, almost 50 years after it was found.

It's a pity that the picture I took of the fossil as it was found wasn't good. By the way, another museum for the 'to see' list: the Teylers Museum of Natural History, in Haarlem; the oldest public museum of the Netherlands. In its funds we can find an specimen of Archaeopteryx and, odd enough, they have found recently that they also had a mosasaur recovered before Hoffman's, but also from the Maastricht limestones. Interesting, huh?