This dolphin-like creature, called an ichthyosaur, is the first of its kind to be discovered in Chile, where it was retrieved from a dig site near the Tyndall Glacier in the Southern Patagonian Ice Field.
"This site is really unique, because it’s capturing a time period in Earth’s history where we don’t have a very good fossil record for marine reptiles," Erin Maxwell, an ichthyosaur specialist and curator of marine reptiles at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany who helped excavate the fossil, told Live Science.These formidable marine reptiles mostly ate ancient, hard-shelled squid relatives, as well as some types of fish and smaller ichthyosaurs.
At 13 feet (4 meters) long, the Tyndall ichthyosaur is a medium-sized specimen that dates to around 129 to 139 million years ago, in the early part of the Cretaceous period (about 145 million to 66 million years ago)."There is often a very large lag between discovery of the fossil and study of the fossil," Maxwell explained In this case, the delay was partly due to location: the Tyndall Glacier is extremely remote, and so every fossil from the site — including 23 other ichthyosaurs that were discovered alongside Fiona — had to be carefully airlifted out by helicopter after excavation."We have almost a hundred ichthyosaurs in the Tyndall Glacier fossil deposit and many of them, unfortunately, will never be excavated, due to the difficulty of access, being in risk areas (cliff edge), and lack of funds," Pardo-Pérez said in a statement.
The first known pregnant ichthyosaur fossil, discovered in 1749 and scientifically described in 1842, confirmed that ichthyosaurs produce live young rather than laying eggs like most modern reptiles do, she added.
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