NICE: French customs officers seized nine dinosaur teeth last month from a courier truck transiting through the country from Spain on its way to Italy, they said on Friday.

The teeth, probably from Morocco, were found during a routine check along a highway running along France’s Mediterranean coastline near the Italian border, customs official Samantha Verduron said.

Using sniffer dogs and opening some parcels at random, inspectors have been known to find cannabis or even cocaine among such truckloads of hundreds of parcels travelling from Spain to Italy, she said.

But on Jan 27, officials from the French border town of Menton found nine enormous teeth in two parcels that were destined for addresses near the Italian cities of Genoa and Milan, French customs said. An expert at the Menton prehistory museum helped identify the fossils as probably dating back tens of millions of years and originating from what is now Morocco.

They included the tooth of a long-necked marine reptile called a zarafasaura oceanis, a type of plesiosaurus at least 66 million years old first discovered in Morocco. Some people believe plesiosauruses, which lived in different parts of the globe, inspired the legend of the Loch Ness monster in Scotland.

Three other teeth would have once belonged to a mosasaurus, an extinct aquatic lizard with a long snout. The remaining five teeth were thought to belong to a dyrosaurus, an ancestor of the crocodile.

Published in Dawn, February 15th, 2025