‘Sword Dragon’ ichthyosaur had huge eyes and a deadly snout

Meet the “Sword Dragon”, a newly-named species of ichthyosaur – predatory prehistoric reptiles that dominated the oceans whereas dinosaurs dominated the land.

The beautifully-preserved fossilised skeleton was discovered on the UK’s Jurassic Coast close to an space known as Golden Cap again in 2001, and sat for years within the collections of the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada.

“They knew it was one thing attention-grabbing,” says Dean Lomax on the College of Manchester, UK. “They had been going to work on it however they only by no means did.”

Lomax and his colleagues have now ready and recognized the specimen, which has an infinite eye socket and an extended, sword-like snout. The fossil additionally has “needle-like piercing tooth [that] are very a lot designed for feasting on soft-bodied prey like squid and fish”, says Lomax. “You will get a great sense of how this factor would have been in life, mainly counting on actually good imaginative and prescient to hunt, in all probability in dim situations.”

The animal would have been round 3 metres lengthy – in regards to the dimension of a standard bottlenose dolphin – and lived throughout an age of the Early Jurassic known as the Pliensbachian, some 193 to 184 million years in the past.

It has options which have by no means been seen in an ichthyosaur earlier than, together with a novel bone across the nostril known as a lacrimal with prong-like constructions. “The extent of three-dimensional preservation, significantly of cranial sutures and delicate constructions such because the lacrimal and prefrontal projections, is outstanding,” says Aubrey Roberts on the Pure Historical past Museum on the College of Oslo in Norway.

A darkish mass between the ribs may be its final meal, however the group couldn’t decide what that was.

Due to the lethal-looking snout, the researchers have named the ichthyosaur Xiphodracon goldencapensis, or the Sword Dragon from Golden Cap.

The specimen additionally reveals one thing about ichthyosaur evolution. “The principle significance of this discover is its age,” says Roberts. On the finish of the Triassic Interval, there have been large super-predator ichthyosaurs, like Ichthyotitan – considered almost 25 metres lengthy, as large as a blue whale. However these big reptiles disappear from the fossil report after the end-Triassic extinction occasion some 201.4 million years in the past, which additionally marks the beginning of the Jurassic Interval.

The stays of all kinds of smaller ichthyosaurs have been discovered relationship to the Jurassic, says Lomax. Many are recognized from earlier than the Pliensbachian and plenty of after, however there are two varieties which are fairly distinct, with no species in widespread.

“Triassic ichthyosaurs had been notoriously bizarre,” says Neil Kelley at Vanderbilt College in Tennessee. “And their Jurassic descendants have typically been seen as a bit extra ‘samey’ in sharing a superficially comparable dolphin-like look.”

“Xiphodracon provides one other hue to the broader ichthyosaur rainbow,” he says, by contributing to the proof Jurassic ichthyosaurs pursued a wide range of life, with differing diets, swimming speeds and most popular habitats.

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