Scientists Find Plaster Copies of Fossil Destroyed by Nazis #fossil #ichthyosaur #paleontology #history

Yale cast (top) and Berlin cast (bottom) Dean Lomax via Twitter (cropped)

Smithsonian Magazine has a story about an interesting rediscovery.  In 1818, Mary Anning discovererd one of most complete ichthyosaur skeletons ever found.  The fossil eventually made its way to the Royal College of Surgeons in London, where it was destroyed in WW II by the Nazi bombing.  There were a few drawing, but the fossil was thought lost forever.  Recently, Dean Lomax a paleontologist at the University of Manchester in England, found two copies of the Anning specimen... one at Yale and the other in Berlin at the Natural History Museum.

“Before the fame of the dinosaurs, ichthyosaurs were ‘the’ famous prehistoric reptiles. Their big skulls, eyes and teeth captured the public’s imagination, making the ichthyosaurs icons of evolution,” Dean Lomax, a paleontologist at the University of Manchester in England and co-author of the paper, says in a statement.

The three-foot-long skeleton was placed in a London collection of the Royal College of Surgeons, where it remained for more than a century. Then, in May 1941, Nazis bombed the city during World War II, and the specimen was destroyed. With no written records documenting any casts made from the fossil, scientists assumed the ichthyosaur was lost forever—that only the scientific illustration remained.

But 75 years later, in 2016, Lomax and his colleague Judy Massare, a paleontologist at SUNY College at Brockport, made a discovery that would change that. While searching for ichthyosaurs in a collection at Yale University’s Peabody Museum, they stumbled across the plaster cast of a dusty crocodile-like specimen. 

“We both looked at each other, and we’re like, ‘Why does that seem familiar?’” Lomax tells the New York Times’ Gemma Conroy. “There was just something about this cast.”