New species of marine reptile from Jurassic period found

Scientists have revealed a new species of ichthyosaur - a dolphin-like marine reptile from the age of dinosaurs - in Iraq.
The study could revolutionise our understanding of the evolution and extinction of these ancient marine reptiles.
The results, produced by a collaboration of researchers from universities and museums in Belgium and the UK contradict previous theories that suggest the ichthyosaurs of the Cretaceous period - the span of time between 145 and 66 million years ago - were the last survivors of a group on the decline.
Ichthyosaurs are marine reptiles known from hundreds of fossils from the time of the dinosaurs.

"They ranged in size from less than one to over 20 metres in length. All gave birth to live young at sea, and some were fast-swimming, deep-diving animals with enormous eyeballs and a so-called warm-blooded physiology," said lead author Dr Valentin Fischer of the University of Liege in Belgium.
Until recently, it was thought that ichthyosaurs declined gradually in diversity through multiple extinction events during the Jurassic period.

These successive events were thought to have killed off all ichthyosaurs except those strongly adapted for fast-swimming life in the open ocean. Due to this pattern, it has been assumed that ichthyosaurs were constantly and rapidly evolving to be ever-faster open-water swimmers.

However, an entirely new ichthyosaur from the Kurdistan region of Iraq substantially alters this view of the group. The specimen concerned was found during the 1950s by British petroleum geologists.
Study of the specimen began during the 1970s with ichthyosaur expert Robert Appleby, then of University College, Cardiff.
In the new study, researchers name it Malawania anachronus, which means 'out of time swimmer'. Despite being Cretaceous in age, Malawania represents the last-known member of a kind of ichthyosaur long believed to have gone extinct during the Early Jurassic, more than 66 million years earlier.
Remarkably, this kind of archaic ichthyosaur appears characterised by an evolutionary stasis: they seem not to have changed much between the Early Jurassic and the Cretaceous, a very rare feat in the evolution of marine reptiles.

"Malawania's discovery is similar to that of the coelacanth in the 1930s: it represents an animal that seems 'out of time' for its age. This 'living fossil' of its time demonstrates the existence of a lineage that we had never even imagined.
"Maybe the existence of such Jurassic-style ichthyosaurs in the Cretaceous has been missed because they always lived in the Middle-East, a region that has previously yielded only a single, very fragmentary ichthyosaur fossil," said Fischer.
The study was published in the journal Biology Letters.