You don’t want to meet while soaking in the ichthyosaur at an early stage Cretaceous Sea.It doubles Kyhytysuka sachicarum: This newly identified 130 million year old marine reptile, now known from fossils in central Colombia, was larger than other ichthyosaur species and had knife-like teeth. .. Their long, toothy nose.
These big teeth would have made it possible K. sachicarum Attacks large prey such as fish and other marine reptiles.
“Other fauna had small, same-sized teeth to eat small prey, but this new species has changed tooth size and spacing to create a tooth weapon for sending large prey. “We did,” says Hans Larson, a paleontologist at the Redpath Museum at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Said in a statement..
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Family showing one tooth
Ichthyosaurs are a large group of marine predators, Triassic From terrestrial reptiles that returned to the sea about 250 million years ago. The last species became extinct in the Late Cretaceous, about 90 million years ago. With a long nose and big eyes, it looked like a swordfish. Most species had jaws lined with small conical teeth suitable for catching small prey.
The newly identified species may have been at least twice as long as an adult human, based on the size of the fossils found (most of the skull and some fragments of the spine and ribs). .. Perhaps ichthyosaur fossils were first excavated in Colombia in the 1960s, but researchers have investigated the species and exactness of how ichthyosaurs in the region were associated with other ichthyosaurs at the same time. I couldn’t agree on a relationship.
For a new study, Larsson and his colleagues focused on the skull stored in the collection of the Museum of Paleobiotics in Colombia, another partial skull from the spine and thorax stored in the Centrode Investigaciones Paleontológicas in Colombia. I also considered bones. Larson and his colleagues announced the discovery and name of a marine reptile on November 22nd. Systematic paleontology journal..
“We were able to compare this animal with other Jurassic and Cretaceous ichthyosaurs and define a new type of ichthyosaur,” Erin Maxwell of the Stuttgart National Museum of Natural History in Germany said in a statement. rice field. “This shakes the evolutionary tree of ichthyosaurs and allows us to test new ideas about how they evolved.”
Marine predator
Researchers have named the new ichthyosaur species Kyhytysuka, which means “cut with a sharp object” in the language of Colombian indigenous Muisca culture. There are other species of ichthyosaurs with large teeth for catching large prey.I will study, but those seeds are early Jurassic, At least 44 million years ago K. sachicarum.
The new species lived in the age of the supercontinent Pangea It was divided into two land masses, south and north. Earth It was warming and the sea level was rising. At the end of the Jurassic, the sea experienced an extinct cataclysm, killing deep-sea ichthyosaur species, marine crocodiles, and plesiosaurs. These animals have been replaced by sea turtles, plesiosauria, and marine reptiles called mosasaurus, which look like a mixture of sharks and sharks. Crocodile, And this giant new ichthyosaur was said by research co-author Dirley Cortés at the Redpath Museum in Magill.
“We are discovering many new species in the rocks from which this new ichthyosaur comes from,” Cortez said in a statement. “We are testing the idea that this region and era of Colombia is a hotspot for ancient biodiversity, and we use fossils to better understand the evolution of marine ecosystems during this transition. I am. “
Originally published in Live Science
This 130 million year old ichthyosaur was “hypercarnivorous” with knife-like teeth.
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