The finds will allow scientists to study the historic ichthyosaur in unprecedented detail.
When paleontologist Dean Lomax was plumbing the depths of a fossil collection at Yale University’s Peabody Museum of Natural History in 2016, one dusty specimen caught his eye. It resembled a crocodile compressed onto a slab of slate. Flaking paint and specks of white plaster revealed the “skeleton” was actually a carefully constructed plaster cast—and that it was of no crocodile.
The finds will allow scientists to study the historic ichthyosaur in unprecedented detail, experts say. Paleontologists had relied solely on a 200-year-old illustration of the creature, notes Daniel Brinkman, a museum assistant in the Peabody’s vertebrate paleontology department who helped Lomax study the Yale cast but is not an author of the new study. The new casts offer an opportunity to see just how well historical illustrations match up with the specimens themselves, he says.
The remarkable find offered early paleontologists a tantalizing glimpse of what these puzzling prehistoric reptiles really looked like. “This specimen was a major piece of the gigantic prehistoric jigsaw puzzle,” Lomax says. Then came Lomax’s discovery of the two casts—one in the storerooms of the Natural History Museum in Berlin, a somewhat ironic home given the fiery fate of the original specimen.
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