No. This has nothing to do with the promotions of the upcoming “Jurassic World” movie. This is the real thing.
A fossil of what appears to be a 170 million-year-old marine reptile, which combines the features of a fish and a lizard, has been found by amateur fossil collector named Brian Shawcross on the Isle of Skye in Scotland.
Subsequent studies on the specimens by scientists and researchers indicate that the ‘fish lizard’ is a member of the extinct marine reptile that lived during the middle Jurassic period between 176 million to 161 million years ago, details Live Science.
A dinosaur specie
The ‘fish lizard’ belongs to the group of marine reptiles which scientist called as ichthyosaurs. For the ordinary layman, any pre-historic animal or creature that has a saurs or a saurus in its name is classified as Jurassic because it most likely lived during the time of the dinosaurs, which the ‘fish lizard’ finding seem to indicate.
Scottish researchers and a palaeontologist in Scotland confirmed that the ichthyosaurs lived during the time of the dinosaurs and were known as the king of the oceans before the emergence of the large sharks and whales.
The first fossils of ichthyosaurs were first discovered in England, hinting that the species or the great population of the species lived in the country’s waters once. But it is only with Shawcross’ fossil discovery that scientists confirmed that the marine reptile also lived near the oceans of Scotland.
Stephen Brusatte, a palaeontologist at the University of Edinburgh, and co-author of the study on the ‘fish lizard’ that was published in the Scottish Journal of Geology on January 12, 2015, says that the newly-discovered fossil is one of the select few specimens of the Jurassic age in the world and that it is only the first time that a fossil was found to be distinctly Scottish.
Scientific name
Scientists eventually decided to name the new species Dearcmhara shawcrossi, in honor of the fossil discoverer who instead of taking the specimen home decided to donate it to a local archaeological museum. Dearcmhara, on the other hand, is a Gaelic word for marine lizard.
When the fossils were turned over to the Scottish researchers by the museum, it contained the arm bone and vertebrae of a new ichthyosaurus genus and species. Further studies indicate the marine reptile was about 14 feet long or just about the size of a motorboat.
Scientific records indicate that during the middle Jurassic age, ichthyosaurs began evolving as smaller ichthyosaurs gave way to larger and more advanced ones which still cannot be explained until now. The smaller ones eventually became extinct while the larger ones ruled the seas until it also went into extinction some 95 million years ago.
The fossil discovered was from the species of smaller ichthyosaurs that lived earlier than the bigger species.