A pair of Platypterygius sp. Image credit: Dmitry Bogdanov / CC BY 3.0.
Sci News has a piece about the discovery of a new species of Cretaceous ichthyosaur from New Zealand. The specimen, GS15687, is still unnamed as it is too fragmentary. It was found disarticulated in a concretion from the Swale Member of the Split Rock Formation. The concretion dates to the Cenomanian (Ngaterian) about 98 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period. Interestingly, the final extinction of the ichthyosaurs occurred just a few million years later. The description was published in the paper "A platypterygiid ichthyosaur from the Cenomanian of central New Zealand" was pubished in the journal Vertebrate Paleontology. The animal thought to be a late branching member of the platypterygiid ichthyosaurs, closely related to an Eastern Gondwanan species called Platypterygius australis and to many European Cretaceous ichthyosaurs.
“Ichthyosaurs were a clade of secondarily aquatic marine reptiles that inhabited the seas for much of the Mesozoic Era, first appearing in the Early Triassic before their ultimate extinction at the Cenomanian-Turonian boundary,” said University of Canterbury paleontologist George Young and his colleagues.
“Cretaceous ichthyosaurs were once thought of as a group with low diversity and disparity resulting from a long-term decline since the Jurassic.”
“However, recent work has produced a growing body of evidence that Cretaceous ichthyosaurs were much more diverse than previously thought.”
