By Helen Briggs BBC News
5 hours ago
Scientific detective work on
fossils collected in Victorian times has identified two new species of
Ichthyosaurs - the giant reptiles that swam at the time of the dinosaurs.
It brings to six the known
species of Ichthyosaurus - ''sea dragons'' that ruled the oceans in Jurassic
times.
Both fossils were unearthed in
Somerset in the 1800s.
One specimen has been on display
at Bristol University for decades, under the gaze of countless students.
The other was donated to a museum
in Philadelphia, US, by Thomas Hawkins, a well-known Victorian fossil
collector.
He amassed a huge collection of
marine reptiles from Somerset in the first half of the 19th Century.
Such was the Victorian craze for
skeletons of ichythyosaurs - the first was found by Mary Anning on the Dorset
coast - that they ended up in museums and collections right across the world.
Palaeontologists Dean Lomax of
Manchester University and Judy Massare of Brockport College, New York, examined
hundreds of ichthyosaur fossils in Europe and North America, including some
that had been kept hidden for decades.
''These are two new species -
brand new species to science,'' Dean Lomax told BBC News.
''They show that during the early
Jurassic - around 200 million years ago - the ichythyosaur, and specifically
this particular type, was a lot more diverse than previously thought.''
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