Long-lost ‘sea dragon’ replicas unearthed in museum collections

This report will have people taking a closer look at some of their casts.” Decades before the word “dinosaur” entered the scientific lexicon, ichthyosaurs were the rock stars of the nascent paleontology field. The first complete ichthyosaur skeleton hailed from Lyme Regis, a seaside town along southern England’s iconic Jurassic Coast. Eroding out of the area’s wave-battered limestone cliffs are the inhabitants of a tropical sea from 200 million years ago, including squidlike ammonites, pterosaurs, and a slew of marine reptiles, including ichthyosaurs and long-necked plesiosaurs. Fossil hunters have flocked to these crumbling cliffs for centuries, thanks in part to the prodigious collecting of pioneering paleontologist Mary Anning in the early 1800s. The daughter of an amateur fossil hunter, Anning and her brother had uncovered an entire ichthyosaur skull by the time she was 12. At 18, she discovered the most complete ichthyosaur specimen known at the time—the skeleton that became the source of the two rediscovered casts. The remarkable find offered early paleontologists a tantalizing glimpse of what these puzzling prehistoric reptiles really looked like. “This specimen was a major piece of the gigantic prehistoric jigsaw puzzle,” Lomax says. The three surviving representations of the first complete ichthyosaur skeleton, including the 1819 illustration (top), the Yale cast (middle), and the Berlin cast (bottom) Wil...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research