The Arctic River is found with deposits of ichthyosaurs and other marine creatures that could be traced only 250 years back in one of the oldest marine ecosystems. As per the media reports, it was discovered on the isolated Arctic Island of Spitsbergen, Norway.
The ichthyosaur was believed to be one of the primitive forms, yet the researchers have not labeled it with a scientific name as it appears anatomically different and advanced.
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Ichthyosaur on an Arctic Island
The Ichthyosaur is one of the most prominent and fittest sorts of marine reptiles that prospered during the age and time of dinosaurs. These marine animals were not ordinary; some of them were even 70 feet long, greater than even the largest of the whales in the history of Earth’s oceans.
Ichthyosaurs in appearance were much more similar to dolphins, except that they had vertical tail flukes than horizontal ones. Some of them resembled large whales. The biggest of them was Shastasaurus, which was about 70 feet long and ate fish and squid.
Up until now, the oldest of the ichthyosaur species was seen to be a 16-inch-long creature, namely, Cartorhynchus, that survived almost 248 million years ago in China. Also, scientists propose that similar to whales and in line with some of the other reptile lineages inhabiting the oceans of Earth, Ichthyosaurs evolved from ancestors that initially lived on land but later evolved into an amphibian species.
Their sudden discovery in one of the remotest of the Arctic islands is an unfathomable mystery. The origin of species is likely to urge a discovery, as their presence in such a harsh locale after the passage of so many years raises many eyebrows.
Why are Arctic Island’s fossils surprising?
The fossils were discovered at a site with high, snow-covered mountains along the coast of a deep fjord. The fossils came to the surface from a river channel fed by the melting snow cutting across the rock layers that were previously muddy at the bottom of the sea. Although today Spitsbergen is home to polar bears and beluga whales, 230 million years ago it would have been full of sharks, fish, shelled squid-like ammonoids, and temnospondyls.
The official report is exciting as the fossil is an 11-tail vertebra that was identified to be among the top predators. Furthermore, the fossils also depicted ichthyosaurs giving live birth to their young.
After the conduction of a series of tests like geochemical, computerized micro tomographic, and bone microstructural analyses, the reports confirmed that the mammal is one of the most highly advanced, fastest-growing, and largest-bodied warm-blooded fully oceanic ichthyosaurs. This report is authorized by Benjamin Kear, one of the curators of vertebrate paleontology at Uppsala University.
There is a manifold mysterious part of the implications of this discovery. One of the exciting parts is that the long-searched walking ichthyosaurs are still undiscovered. This is set in parallel to the new-found discovery of the earliest form of a whale, called Ambulocetus, which stands similar to the “walking whale,” possessing limbs that enabled it to walk on land.
The most promising part is that the long-anticipated discovery of ichthyosaurs with transitional ancestors must have existed long before it was predicted. The puzzling part is the presence of the oldest species of ichthyosaur, whose presence can be dated back to millions of years ago when the mass extinction of vast species of animals on Earth put a full stop to the Permian period. This period witnesses the wiping out of almost 90 percent of the species on the planet against the backdrop of Siberian volcanism.
Kear optimizes this discovery to propose that ichthyosaur origins must have predated the mass extinction event by almost 20 million years. The Triassic period following its mass extinction saw the emergence of dinosaurs. However, the oldest known dinosaurs could not be traced back until 230 million years ago.
