Key Points
Ichthyosaurs were a successful group of marine reptiles that prospered during the age of dinosaurs, some reaching up to around 70 feet (21 meters) long exceeded in size in the history of Earths oceans only by the largest of the whales...
Fossils dating to about 250 million years ago unearthed in a harsh and remote locale Norways Arctic island of Spitsbergen are now providing surprising insight into the rise of ichthyosaurs...
Researchers said they found remains of the earliest-known ichthyosaur, which lived approximately 2 million years after Earths worst mass extinction that ended the Permian Period, wiping out roughly 90% of the planets species amid massive Siberian volcanism..
The real surprise was that after a suite of geochemical, computerized micro-tomographic and bone microstructural analyses, the vertebrae turned out to be from a highly advanced, fast-growing, probably warm-blooded, large-bodied at around 3 meters long, and fully oceanic ichthyosaur, said Benjamin Kear, curator of vertebrate palaeontology at Uppsala Universitys Museum of Evolution in Sweden and lead author of the research published in the journal Current Biology...
While today there are polar bears and beluga whales at Spitsbergen, 250 million years ago the sea there would have been teeming with fish, sharks, shelled squid-like ammonoids and crocodile-like marine amphibians called temnospondyls...
