A reconstruction of what the Xiphodracon may have looked like. Image courtesy of Bob Nicholls
Joel Kontinen
A beautifully preserved skeleton found on the UK’s Jurassic Coast has been identified as a new species of the marine reptiles known as ichthyosaurs
The ichthyosaurus was a predatory animal, that according to
evolutionists live at the time when dinosaurs ruled the world.
The beautifully-preserved fossilised skeleton was found on
the UK’s Jurassic Coast near an area called Golden Cap back in 2001, and sat
for years in the collections of the Royal
Ontario Museum in Canada.
“They knew it was something interesting,” says Dean Lomax at the University of
Manchester, UK. “They were going to work on it but they just never did.”
Lomax and his colleagues have now prepared and identified
the specimen, which has an enormous eye socket and a long, sword-like snout.
The fossil also has “needle-like piercing teeth [that] are very much designed
for feasting on soft-bodied prey like squid and fish”, says Lomax. “You can get
a good sense of how this thing would have been in life, basically relying on
really good vision to hunt, probably in dim conditions.”
The animal would have been around 3 metres long – about the
size of a common bottlenose
dolphin – and lived during an age of the Early Jurassic called the
Pliensbachian, some 193 to 184 million years ago.
It has
features that have never been seen in an ichthyosaur before, including a unique
bone around the nostril called a lacrimal with prong-like structures. “The
level of three-dimensional preservation, particularly of cranial sutures and
delicate structures such as the lacrimal and prefrontal projections, is
exceptional,” says Aubrey
Roberts at the Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo in
Norway.
A dark mass between the ribs might be its last meal, but the
team couldn’t determine what that was.
Source:
Chris Simms 2025 'Sword Dragon' ichthyosaur had enormous eyes and a lethal snout | New Scientist10 October