Discovery of Oldest Ichthyosaur Fossil Shatters Previous Theories
Fossils discovered on Spitsbergen are shedding new light on the origins of the oldest marine reptiles. It turns out that ichthyosaurs appeared on Earth many millions of years earlier than we thought.
Scientists to this day are unsure how the first marine reptiles that dominated the oceans and stood at the top of the food chain of their ecosystem evolved. The most common theory is that the oldest reptiles living in the seas came together in the period that followed the Permian extinction, some 251 million years ago. The cataclysm caused many species to have to adapt to the new reality on Earth, and the evolutionary development of some creatures followed.
Fossil of oldest ichthyosaur sheds new light on origins of marine reptiles
A recent study, however, sheds new light on the genesis of marine reptiles on our planet. The fossils of an ichthyosaur unearthed on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen have been analyzed by paleontologists. This is the largest island in the Svalbard archipelago, which belongs to Norway. A team of Swedish and Norwegian scientists says that the surprisingly large size of this individual and some features of internal structures indicate that the animal was one of the survivors of the extinction period. This means…
