250-million-year-old marine reptile fossil found on arctic mountain

Ancient remains of a terrifying 250-million-year-old sea reptile have been found halfway up a mountain in Norway.

The ichthyosaur fossil shows that the feared predator of the oceans appeared to have existed long before scientists thought.

The remains come from rocks from mountain ranges in Svalbard, Norway’s remote arctic climate island that once formed the sea floor.

It is traditionally believed that ichthyosaurs evolved and thrived alongside dinosaurs during the Mesozoic Era.

But the newly discovered fossils reportedly show the creatures evolved much earlier.

The new fossils reportedly include 11 vertebrae and 15 bone fragments that Benjamin Kear of Uppsala University in Sweden and his colleagues at the University of Oslo in Norway believe came from an ichthyopterygian.

These eel-like reptiles are thought to have lived in the water and were ancestors of the dolphin-shaped ichthyosaurs.

The experts then carried out numerous analyzes ranging from rock chemistry to the microscopic bone structure.

“Unexpectedly, these vortices appeared in rocks said to be too old for ichthyosaurs,” Uppsala University said in a statement obtained by Newsflash.

“Rather than presenting the textbook example of an amphibious ichthyosaur ancestor, the vertebrae are identical to those of geologically much younger, larger-bodied ichthyosaurs and even preserve the internal bone microstructure that exhibits adaptive traits of rapid growth, increased metabolism, and a fully oceanic lifestyle.”

“It turned out that the vertebrae came from a sophisticated, fast-growing, probably warm-blooded, and fully oceanic ichthyosaur,” Kear said.

The remains were reportedly encased in a layer of rock that formed almost two million years after the end of the mass extinction, making them the earliest Ichthyopterygic fossils found to date.

“Near the hunting lodges on the south coast of the Icefjord in western Spitsbergen, the Blumental cuts through snow-capped mountains, exposing layers of rock that were once seabed mud some 250 million years ago,” the university said.

“A fast-moving river fed by snowmelt has eroded the mudstone to reveal rounded limestone outcrops called concretions.”

“These formed from calcareous sediments that deposited around decomposing animal remains on the ancient seabed, subsequently conserving them in spectacular three-dimensional detail.”

Paleontologists today hunt for these concretions to study the fossil tracks of long-extinct sea creatures.

During a 2014 expedition, a large number of concretions from Flower’s Valley were collected and sent back to the University of Oslo Museum of Natural History for future study.

Kear confirmed that the animal they discovered was already aquatic and suggested that the first amphibious ichthyosaur ancestors must be even older.

More analysis and more fossils are needed to determine whether these reptiles adapted to the seas before the ecological catastrophe struck.

The research results were published on Monday in the renowned international journal Current Biology.

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