Dating back 246 million years: Marine reptile discovered

The ancient fossil consists of a single vertebra excavated at the foothills of Mount Harper on New Zealand’s South Island.

This location is quite remarkable, as evidence of the early migration of reptiles into the oceans has until now only been known from the island of Spitsbergen in the Arctic, northwestern North America, and southwestern China.

The fossil itself is not new; it was first discovered in 1978, but we are only now able to understand its significance through new analyses.

It belonged to a nothosaur, a relative of the sauropterygians—the plesiosaurs that were approximately 7 meters long and used four paddle-like limbs to move through the water.

'MORE THAN 40 MILLION YEARS OLDER'

In a statement, Dr. Benjamin Kear said, "The nothosaur found in New Zealand is more than 40 million years older than the previously known oldest sauropterygian fossils from the Southern Hemisphere."

Typically, the oldest nothosaur fossils have been found along the northern edges of Panthalassa, so this discovery changes what we know about where these animals originated and how they spread.

'SPREAD RAPIDLY BOTH SOUTH AND NORTH'

Kear stated, "Using a time-calibrated evolutionary model of their global distribution, we show that nothosaurs originated near the equator, then spread rapidly both north and south simultaneously with the re-establishment of complex marine ecosystems following the catastrophic mass extinction that marked the beginning of the Age of Dinosaurs."

News Source: 12punto