…Jurassic-Age "Marine Lizard.
"The Loch Ness Monster—the famous lake-dwelling beast of the Scottish Highlands—may be a myth, but scientists now say they've identified a real-life Scottish sea monster that lived some 170 million years ago. According to a new study released this week, a fossil found on Scotland's Isle of Skye back in 1959 represents a new species of dolphin-like predator that belonged to a group of extinct marine reptiles called ichthyosaurs.
During the age of the dinosaurs, ichthyosaurs shared the world's seas with the other great marine reptiles, plesiosaurs and mosasaurs, long before the arrival of large sharks and whales. The first ichthyosaurs appeared in the Triassic, which began about 245 million years ago. The group reached its peak of diversity during the Jurassic, then began a decline that led to its extinction in the early stages of the Late Cretaceous, several million years before the last dinosaurs died out.
Somewhere during the Middle Jurassic, according to the fossil record, ichthyosaurs experienced a major shift, as smaller ichthyosaurs began to give way to larger, more advanced ones with bigger eyes. These larger ichthyosaurs then ruled the seas until some 95 million years ago, by which time the entire group had gone extinct. Though scientists don't know why this transition occurred, they might have found a new clue thanks to fossils unearthed on Scotland's Isle of Skye more than a half-century ago…"
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