The skeleton of the first ever fossil ichthyosaur was recreated from casts

Paleontologists have recovered the very first fossil skeleton of an ancient reptile that was discovered by...

called a proteosaur. It was found more than 200 years ago. The reconstruction was made on the basis of plaster casts stored in the museum. The original was lost during the bombing of London in 1941.

The ancient skeleton was found in 1818 inGreat Britain. The Jurassic fossil belonged to an ichthyosaur, a type of ancient marine reptile. Outwardly, they resembled dolphins or sharks and inhabited the ocean before the appearance of the first dinosaurs. The fossil was acquired by the collector Thomas James Burch, who sold it in 1820 to the Royal College of Surgeons in London.

Illustration of an ancient fossil from an 1819 articleyears (a) and plaster casts from Yale University (b) and the Museum of Natural History in Berlin (c). Image: Dean R. Lomax, Judy A. Massare, Royal Society Open Science

During the Second World War in an educational institutiona bomb hit, and part of the collection, including this unique exhibit, was lost. In 2016, while conducting research in the collections of Yale University's Peabody Museum, paleontologists found a very old plaster cast of an ichthyosaur, which they identified as the first known cast of a lost skeleton. In 2019, a second cast was found at the Natural History Museum in Berlin.

Researchers note that before the discovery of thesecopies, the only evidence of the first fossil found was a drawing in an 1819 paper published by the discoverer. With the help of casts, scientists were able to recreate what this animal looked like and refine the illustration, including restoring some of the missing bones.

When we discovered the casts, we feltthe need to present our research to the Royal Society, since the fossil skeleton played an important role in the publication of the first information about ichthyosaurs in the scientific literature more than 200 years ago.

Dean Lomax, paleontologist who found the plaster casts

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On the cover: paleontologist Dean Lomax and a Berlin cast of an ichthyosaur. Image: University of Manchester