Xiphactinus

It has been another day of gloom .. no rain just so dark. Our morning started with three small earthquakes all within a hour, the biggest being 4.2. A shaky start to the day.

I am on the Whittaker's Big Egg Hunt that has been running this month throughout New Zealand. I have manage to find 22 here in Christchurch, still one to find.

I did a blip on them the first day they were put up and since then I have found many have gone or been shifted. It is all in support of the Starship Foundation, a charity supporting the national children's hospital. The giant eggs will be auctioned off for the Starship, 80 on Trade Me and the rest at a gala event on April 16.

Xiphactinus (from Latin and Greek for "sword-ray") is an extinct genus of large, 4.5 to 6 m (15 to 20 feet) long predatory marine bony fish that lived during the Late Cretaceous. When alive, the fish would have resembled a gargantuan, fanged tarpon (to which it was, however, not related). The species Portheus molossus described by Cope is a junior synonym of X. audax. Skeletal remains of Xiphactinus have come from Kansas (where the first Xiphactinus fossil was discovered during the 1850s), Alabama, and Georgia in the United States, as well as Europe, Australia, Canada and Venezuela. They lived on earth around 90-65 million years ago.

As you can see by this shot I found this egg by Roger Boyce in the Canterbury Museum today along with one other.