A baby ichthyosaur’s last meal revealed

ichthyosaur illustration

Baby ichthyosaurs like the one illustrated here may have noshed on squid, a new analysis of a museum fossil suggests.

Julian Kiely

As far as last meals go, squid isn’t a bad choice. Cephalopod remains appear to dominate the stomach contents of a newly analyzed ichthyosaur fossil from nearly 200 million years ago.

The ancient marine reptiles once roamed Jurassic seas and commonly pop up in England’s fossil-rich coast near Lyme Regis. But a lot of ichthyosaur museum specimens lack records of where they came from, making their age difficult to place.

Dean Lomax of the University of Manchester and his colleagues reexamined one such fossil. Based on its skull, they identified the creature as a newborn Ichthyosaurus communis. Microfossils of shrimp and amoeba species around the ichthyosaur put the specimen at 199 million to 196 million years old, the researchers estimate.

Tiny hook structures stand out in the newborn’s ribs — most likely the remnants of prehistoric black squid arms. Another baby ichthyosaur fossil that lived more recently had a stomach full of fish scales. So the new find suggests a shift in the menu for young ichthyosaurs at some point in their evolutionary history, the researchers write October 3 in Historical Biology.

This roughly 2-foot-long baby ichthyosaur represents an exceptionally well-preserved Ichthyosaurus communis and the first newborn discovered from that species. Dean Lomax

Helen Thompson is the multimedia editor. She has undergraduate degrees in biology and English from Trinity University and a master’s degree in science writing from Johns Hopkins University.

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