#ichthyosaur

Oh BOY! Story time! All the way back in 2016, on our way back from Munich for a EAVP meeting Sven Sachs got a mail by Georg Göltz, attached were some first images of an incredible specimen. That evening we went over the material again and again...

I remember saying, "well, that looks like a large owl feather" and oh boy... Some time after Sven got Johan Lindgren and Dean Lomax on board who likewise recognized the importance of the fossil and made it happen that all the necessary tests were done to ensure that...

We would get as much information out of the specimen as possible! Now, quite a few years later we can finally show what has been brewing behind the academic curtains for a while.

Temnodontosaurus is a ichthyosaur taxon that is nearly as old of Paleontology itself, and yet, after more than 200 years of research history new details still reveal themselves. This flipper that Georg Göltz found not only showed the flipper outline that was unexpected...

But also revealed completely novel structures that have never been found in a living or extinct animal. Already, kind of, known where the parallel skin grooves that are very visible, even under normal light, but more important are the tiny, light structures on the back of the fin...

These are not bony but cartilaginous in nature and get the new name, chondroderms. These tiny spikes, embedded in the skin, supported a serrated trailing edge that stretched over nearly the full length of the flipper. As closer inspection revealed that these weren't just...

...impressions but that large portions of the skin structure were preserved. Which this wealth of data the researchers were able to do something pretty cool, they could build a digital model of a Temnodontosaurus flipper and test it's properties.

While not that efficient in improving the hydrodynamic properties these structures seem to reduce noise, similar to owl feathers! A puzzle piece that was so far completely absent from any considerations about the livestyle of these early Jurassic predators!

However this fits well to what we already knew. Large eyes, long but robust jaws and stomach content that consists of other fast prey like belemnites and other ichthyosaurs speak for a ambush predator, in this case a silent one.

I became part of this project first as a interested observer but only a few month before it went into review Johan asked me to make some artwork of the press release. As I had a rather tricky perspective in mind I actually build for this a model of Temnodontosaurus.

Eventually a took a shot of the model in a way that satisfied me and I went to finish it digitally. We decided to show it swimming into a swarm of belemnites. The specimen has a small flipper injury to show of better that structure of the fin.

There is much more to say about this fossil but thankfully the paper, published in Nature, is OPEN ACCESS! have a look!

Remember me and that is enough

A pair of Cartorhynchus lenticarpus, swimming in the shallow coastal waters of Early Triassic Asia

Cartorhynchus is a really interesting basal ichtyosauriform that probably preyed on small, hard-shelled animals.

Engraving to accompany 'Ballad of the Ichthyosaurus' poem from Punch magazine, February 14th, 1885, pg. 82

Well this was a work of more than 2 months that just ended up taking longer than necessary due to procrastination, I have seen little or almost no work done on skeletal reconstructions of Temnodontosaurus trigonodon so I decided to work on a modern one with the new flippers.

As well finishing this skeleton, it was important to reconstruct it on the flesh, a peculiar form even among ichthyosaurs with its giant pairs of wing-shaped flippers, and a gigantic semi-lunar tail that would have allowed it to swim quickly.

Worth to mention too, I finally considered starting a blog to collect and display my entries while I continue deciding which other apps and sites can offer better hosting, you can fin more imput regarding minor details as well some things regarding Temnodontosaurus gigantism.