And off to the side was a double row of vertebrae that was in the same configuration as McMenamin and his team had seen in the original
ichthyosaur remains.
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.
Join Dean Lomax, palaeontologist and world expert on early Jurassic
Ichthyosaurs, to find out more about life in the Jurassic seas.
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Ichthyosaur event at Lapworth Museum IMAGE: BOB NICHOLLS
Although thousands of
ichthyosaur fossils have been unearthed in the UK, the one found in Warwickshire is particularly important and unusual because it is threedimensionally preserved - and contains bones of the skull that are rarely exposed.
A nearly metre-long skull of a giant fossil marine
ichthyosaur found in a farmer's field more than 60 years ago has been studied for the first time.
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Ichthyosaurs are interesting because they have many traits in common
Yorkshire's Jurassic World, Yorkshire Museum, York (Until March 2020) Travel back 150 million years to serve a sauropod its supper, inspect an
ichthyosaur, and marvel at a megalosaurus tooth.
At more than 80ft from head to tail, it was about the size of a blue whale - the most massive
ichthyosaur ever found.
On BBC1 at 8pm tonight, the TV legend brings to life a 200million-year-old fossil of an
ichthyosaur, found in Dorset, in Attenborough And The Sea Dragon.