Ichthyosaurs

A fossil stored in a Doncaster museum for 30 years and thought to be a plaster copy has turned out to be a new species of ancient reptile.

A young palaeontologist working with the University of Manchester found the fossil in 2008, in the collections of Doncaster Museum and Art Gallery.

He realised it was the 189-million-year-old remains of an ichthyosaur - further study confirmed it to be a previously unknown species.

It was so well preserved he could determine the contents of its stomach, which were actually the hooks from the tentacles of squid.

It is not uncommon to find ichthyosaur fossils in England. The sharp-toothed marine reptiles swam in large numbers in the seas around Britain when the dinosaurs roamed.

Ichthyosaurs

• Often misidentified as "swimming dinosaurs", they first appeared in the early Triassic period (251 million to 199 million years ago)
• The name means fish-lizard, although the creature has been classified as a reptile since the mid-19th Century
• Its length ranged from 1m to 14m - although the average length was 2m to 3m (the Doncaster fossil is 1.5m)
• The creature was noted for its sharp, robust teeth.
• Ichthyosaurs became extinct before the dinosaurs, dying out in the early part of the late Cretaceous period (145.5 million to 65.5 million years ago)

This new species has now been named Ichthyosaurus anningae - in honour of Mary Anning, the British fossil-hunter who discovered the first ichthyosaur on the Dorset coast in about 1811.

Thanks to Tom Penhall for sending a link