For almost 190 years, scientists have been researching where the ancient sea-dwelling reptiles from the Dinosaur Age came from. Recently, a group of Swedish and Norwegian experts in fossils found remains of one of these reptiles on an island in the far north called Spitsbergen. It’s the earliest known type of fish-lizard that has ever existed!
Ichthyosaurs were a kind of sea animal that no longer exists. We’ve found their fossils all around the world! They were some of the first animals to get used to living in salty water and shaped their bodies like modern whales. Ichthyosaurs ruled over the ocean while dinosaurs lived on land, and they stayed dominant for more than 160 million years.
After the mass extinction event 252 million years ago, reptiles started living in the sea. They did this by adapting themselves to their new environment and developing flippers instead of regular walking legs. Their bodies changed as well – they took a more fish-like form which allowed them to move better in water. The final change was that they didn’t have to come back to land anymore- they could have live babies in the ocean!
The fossils found on Spitsbergen have changed the accepted idea.
Close to some hunting cabins near the southern shore of Ice Fjord in western Spitsbergen, there is a valley that was created from rivers flowing down from snow-capped mountains. Long ago, around 250 million years ago, this valley was under the sea. The river has washed away mudstone rocks to reveal round limestone boulders called concretions. These were formed by limey sediments that surrounded animal remains on the ancient seabed and preserved them in three-dimensional detail. Today, scientists (paleontologists) come here to search for these concretions so they can learn more about the fossils of creatures that lived long ago beneath our oceans.
In 2014, a group of researchers went on an expedition and collected a lot of rocks from Flower’s Valley. Then, they took the rocks to The Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo so that they could look into them further. Scientists from The Museum of Evolution at Uppsala University studied the rocks and found some fish bones and strange “crocodile-like” amphibian bones, as well as 11 connected tail vertebrae from an ichthyosaur (an extinct marine reptile). This was very surprising because scientists expected the rocks to be too old for ichthyosaurs! But when they examined it closer, their vertebrae were similar to geologically young ichthyosaurs and had special bone structures with characteristics which suggest it lead a life in the ocean and grew quickly.
Testing the rocks around where the fossils were found showed they were about two million years old, dating back to before dinosaurs even existed! This means that ichthyosaurs (which are a type of marine reptile) must have started to appear and spread in oceans much earlier than previously thought. So, our textbooks need to be updated so that the new findings can be included.
Scientists recently made a shocking discovery – they found the oldest ichthyosaur fossil ever! This means that some types of reptiles were around way before the Age of Dinosaurs, which is surprising because this had previously been thought to be when reptiles first began. People need to keep looking for more fossils in old rocks on Spitsbergen and other places all around the world. A paper was published about this in a very important scientific journal called Current Biology.
A new paper published in the scientific journal Current Biology discusses some of the earliest Triassic fossils from an oceanic reptile. The authors of the study believe that these fossils represent evidence that can push back the origins of this kind of creature even further in time than was previously known. The researchers are still trying to learn more about when and how these ancient reptiles first appeared.
