The two-meter skull of a newly discovered giant ichthyosaur species, the oldest known to date, is shed new light on the rapid growth and evolution of marine reptiles into giant ocean dinosaurs, and helping us to understand better the journey of modern cetaceans (whales and dolphins) to become the largest animals that ever inhabited the Earth.
This discovery was published in the journal Science.
While dinosaurs ruled the land, ichthyosaurs and other aquatic reptiles (which were not explicitly dinosaurs) ruled the waves, reaching equally gigantic sizes and species diversity.
With the evolution of fins and the hydrodynamic forms of the body seen in both fish and whales, ichthyosaurs swam in ancient oceans for most of the Age of Dinosaurs.
“Ichthyosaurs come from a still unknown group of terrestrial reptiles and breathed air,” says lead author Martin Sander, a paleontologist at the University of Bonn (Germany) and research associate at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History's Dinosaur Institute ( NHM).
“Since the first skeletal discoveries in southern England and Germany more than 250 years ago, these 'sauri fish' were among the first large fossil reptiles known to science, long before the dinosaurs, and have captured the popular imagination ever since.” .
Excavated from a rock unit called the Fossil Hill Member located in the Augusta Mountains of Nevada (USA), the well-preserved skull, along with part of the spine, shoulder, and index finger, date back to the Middle Triassic (247,2- 237 million years ago), representing the first case of an ichthyosaur to reach epic proportions.
As big as a sperm whale, over 17 meters long, the newly named Cymbospondylus youngorum it is the largest animal so far discovered since that period, on land or at sea.
In fact, it was the first giant creature to inhabit the Earth that we know of.
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