For nearly 190 years, scientists have searched for the origins of ancient sea-going reptiles from the Age of Dinosaurs. Now a team of Swedish and Norwegian palaeontologists has discovered remains of the earliest known ichthyosaur or ‘fish-lizard’ on the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen. Ichthy
Reconstruction of the earliest ichthyosaur and the 250-million-year-old ecosystem found on Spitsbergen. Credit: Illustration by Esther van Hulsen
Ichthyosaurs were an extinct group of marine reptiles whose fossils have been recovered worldwide. They were amongst the first land living animals to adapt to life in the open sea, and evolved a ‘fish-like’ body shape similar to modern whales. Ichthyosaurs were at the top of the food chain in the oceans while dinosaurs roamed the land, and dominated marine habitats for over 160 million years.
According to the textbooks, reptiles first ventured into the open sea after the end-Permian mass extinction, which devastated marine ecosystems and paved the way for the dawn of the Age of Dinosaurs nearly 252 million years ago. As the story goes, land-based reptiles with walking legs invaded shallow coastal environments to take advantage marine predator niches that were left vacant by this cataclysmic event.
During an expedition in 2014, a large number of concretions were collected from Flower’s valley and shipped back to the Natural History Museum at thefor future study. Research conducted with The Museum of Evolution at Uppsala University has now identified bony fish and bizarre ‘crocodile-like’ amphibian bones, together with 11 articulated tail vertebrae from an ichthyosaur. Unexpectedly, these vertebrae occurred within rocks that were supposedly too old for ichthyosaurs.
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