Jurassic-era sea monster found in India
FOSSIL COULD REDEFINE PALAEONTOLOGISTS’ UNDERSTANDING OF HOW THE CREATURES LIVED
village of Lodai, located in India’s western Gujarat province, in 2016, Geographic reported. The bones were encased in dense, sedimentary rock and posed a brutal test for excavators working in a region where temperatures hit nearly 37 degrees Celsius.
Those excavators were tasked with maintaining also the miraculous preservation of the skeleton. Geographic reported that the sea monster’s backbone was discovered more or less in a continuous line. Its left forefin had also maintained its true shape.
Prasad said that based on the patterns in the ichthyosaur’s teeth, the sea monster was a “top-tier predator that fed on hard and abrasive food material”, such as molluscs, fish and even other marine reptiles.
Jaw in rocks
Initially, Prasad and his team couldn’t find any fragments of skull or jaw that had also been preserved. But after digging below the sea monster’s front part, the palaeontologists came across part of the jaw vertically embedded inside the rocks.
“This was an especially useful discovery because the teeth we found offered insights into the ichthyosaur’s diet,” Prasad said.
Prasad told National Geographic that he hadn’t conducted much research on vertebrate fossils of the region, as
‘Massive channel’
Researchers also learned that the Indian ichthyosaur shares close relations with similar reptiles discovered farther north. The connection may suggest that a massive seaway once crossed the ancient continent of Gondwanaland, National Geographic reported.
The seaway would have cut through land now covering India, Madagascar and South America, helping to explain how sea monsters such as the India ichthyosaur navigated through Jurassic oceans.
“This find helps to show how globally widespread ichthyosaurs were during the time of the dinosaurs,” Steve Brusatte, a University of Edinburgh palaeontologist who wasn’t involved in the study, told National Geographic. “They seem to have lived...all over the world, at the same time [as] dinosaurs.”