Happy Friday, San Diego Local 5 wishing you a great morning. My name is Chuck Zoomer, and boy do I have a story for you.
We start here today at the Scripps Institute for Oceanography, where they are preparing a one of a kind enclosure.
"Well, we have it occupying a spare whale enclosure at Sea World of all places, because it needs that much space to swim around in."
That's professor Ike Hearafter, one of the leading Marine Biologists at Scripps. He's busy coordinating a massive and hurried construction project at this one of a kind facility. Spanning well over 3000 square feet, this massive tank sinks below the water level by nearly 78 feet. What could it be built to hold? A whale? A giant squid? Well, to find out, I'm heading dockside at Harverton Portside Fisheries, LLC.
"Step carefully now, wouldn't want to get wet like the last reporter."
Captain Marie Berginot is a Canadian fisher who travels from coast to coast in her vessel the Northumbria II. It's an incredible 110 ft long monster, and you have to charter a smaller vessel out to board it at this tiny dock.
"Wow, that is a big ship."
"She's my whole world, bud."
Boarding the vessel it's easy to see how the massive fishing ship, built to drag nets across the deep ocean just a few yards above the sea floor, could have caught the incredible prehistoric find from last week. If you've been living under a rock, I'll catch you up to speed: its big, it's supposed to be extinct, and it has relatives in the ol' family tree of life called "Dinosaurs". The scientific community, and general public, have been abuzz with activity over the capture of a Mosasaurus.
"So, what was it like?"
"Well eh, he fought reasonably hard. We weren't quite sure what we'd netted, and since there's a host of protected species here, we had to be careful retrieving the line. He had seemingly tired himself out over the course of pulling the net up up, but thankfully we were tender enough not to hurt 'em. He wasn't boat-shy neither once he worked out what'd caught him."
After the historic find, the crew took on water into their cargo hold and dumped the rest of their catch. Marie isn't a regular Canadian by any stretch of the imagination, she also has a Master's from the University of San Diego in Marine Ecology. Mosasaurus just so happens to be her favorite dinosaur, too. The one pulled up had an interesting Seafoam green exterior, black eyes with unusual green pupils, and seemed to make odd noises resembling Dial-Up over the Sonar.
"Soon as we got 'em out of the water the story got weirder since he also started talkin', had these nifty seemingly bio-luminescent lights running to an fro, was like seeing a prehistoric alien, eh?"
Turns out, that Mosasaur was just the first of a bundle of weird Dinosaur Cyborgs calling themselves "Cambrian Ambassadors". Marie is taking Northumbria II back up to British Columbia to dock near Victoria, where she plans to make contact with a second of these unusual and quirky little robotic dinosaurs from another planet. She has to trade her sea-legs in to find them, the next one looks more like a Utah Raptor.