Photos: James Havens' elasmosaur diorama

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Artist James Havens poses with a digital skull reconstruction of an elasmosaur made by Jesse Pruitt and Nicholas Clement of the Idaho Virtualization Laboratory. Havens is using the model to build a diorama in the University Center.

An extinct Alaska version of Scotland's mythical Loch Ness Monster, identified last month in the Talkeetna Mountains, will be part of a multimedia diorama in Midtown Anchorage by artist James Havens.

The find was announced on July 22 in a press release from the University of Alaska Museum of the North. The museum reported that Anchorage fossil collector Curvin Metzler originally spotted vertebrae of the animal in an eroding cliff. He contacted Patrick Druckenmiller, Earth sciences curator at the museum, who visited the site in June and determined it was an elasmosaur, the first discovered in Alaska.

Read more: Newly discovered 'Loch Ness Monster' fossil gets life-size diorama in Anchorage