ichthyosaurus

Ichthyosaurs, meaning ‘fish lizards’, are a bizarre group of ancient marine reptiles that went extinct around 90 million years ago. They looked suspiciously similar to dolphins, but are only very, very distantly related to the modern mammals. They captivated the attention of scientists and the public alike due to numerous discoveries by Victorian palaeontologist, Mary Anning, who collected dozens of skeletons from the Dorset coast in the UK.

As pieces of fossils steadily flow from the ground to museums and institutions worldwide, studies on old specimens are just as important as the new ones. Century-old collections often yield untold stories, lying in wait for someone to sit down and uncover their secrets.

They arose millions of years before the first dinosaurs and dominated the seas in a vast array of finned fish-like and dolphin-like forms. Some were hardly the size of a small porpoise while some were as vast and gentle as today’s biggest whales and still others terrorized their kin with vicious jaws and teeth. They were the spectacular ichthyosaurs, among the most specialized of all marine reptiles.