The remains of the oldest marine reptile discovered on a Norwegian island, an ichthyosaurus at least 3 meters long and lived 252 million years ago, in the same period of the great Permian mass extinction which led to the disappearance of 80-70% of all living species. The study, led by Benjamin Kear of the Swedish University of Uppsala and published in the journal Current Biology, can help shed light on those enigmatic creatures that dominated the seas for millions of years.
Ichthyosaurs are a now extinct group of marine reptiles that populated the seas around the globe for millions of years but their evolutionary origin is currently a puzzle that is still very difficult to reconstruct. In fact, it is believed that ichthyosaurs, between 1 meter and 16 meters long, would have adapted to marine life starting from some group of terrestrial reptiles (something similar to what happened with modern aquatic mammals such as dolphins and whales), but there are no at the moment fossils capable of testifying this path.
To further complicate this scenario is now the discovery, on one of the Svalbard islands, of ancient fossils dating back to 252 million years, i.e. almost simultaneously with the great Permian extinction which around 250 million years led to the disappearance of most of the species of the era. The remains found on the Norwegian island consist of 7 vertebrae preserved in a limestone deposit belonging to an ichthyosaurus of at least 3 meters in length. It would be a new species but it already seems to have all the characteristics of a fully adapted and evolved individual for marine environments. According to the authors of the study, the discovery forces us to hypothesize that the first diversification of ichthyosaurs must therefore have occurred well before the great Permian extinction.
Source: Ansa
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