Bones found on the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen suggest the ancient marine reptiles known as ichthyosaurs roamed Earth's oceans for much longer than we thought.
In spite of their terrestrial origins, the reptiles quickly adapted to life in the water: their legs turned to fins, their snouts elongated and filled with fish-snatching teeth, and their bones became spongy likeFortunately for us, the fossil record is rich with ichthyosaur remains, providing paleontologists with a wealth of information to trace their timeline.
In 2014, paleontologists dug out several items of interest and shipped them to Uppsala University for identification and analysis. Among them were items that no one expected to see in 250 million-year-old fossil beds: 11 articulated tail vertebrae from an adult ichthyosaur.Not some early progenitor 'prototype ichthyosaur' specimen either. The fossils resembled the bones of ichthyosaurs that came much later in history, complete with a spongy marine tetrapod composition.
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