Ichthyosaur find may challenge notions about prehistoric migrations

Two Stanford geologists recently had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time to make the kind of discovery that fossil hunters only dream of: They uncovered the bones of a large aquatic reptile known as an ichthyosaur near the southernmost tip of Chilean Patagonia -- a find that may have scientists rethinking theories about ancient migration routes and the demise of a supercontinent.

news-service.stanford.edu...

"Ichthyosaurs were aquatic reptiles that lived between 250 million and 90 million years ago. They were shaped roughly like dolphins with long, thin noses and disproportionately large eyes. The biggest ichthyosaurs were more than 45 feet long and fed on squid, fish and other marine animals."

The pics of these guys are pretty fierce if you see any artist renditions of them....

This thread may be 20 years old, but the scientific paper from 2003 reporting on the ichthyosaur discovery in southern Chile can be found here:
pubs.geoscienceworld.org...

In spring of last year, an ichthyosaur specimen nicknamed Fiona was found in the Tyndall Glacier area of Chilean Patagonia within the boundaries of the Torres del Paine National Park. Given that the taxon Myobradypterygius (usually synonymized with Platypterygius, although a 2015 thesis finds it distinct from the type species of Platypterygius) is recorded from Chile, it is now apparent that platypterygiine ichthyosaurs were widespread in coastal and epipelagic waters surrounding Patagonia and western Europe by the Hauterivan-Aptian interval.

Pardo Perez, J.M. (2015). Ichthyosaurs from the Early Cretaceous (Hauterivian-Barremian) from the western border of the Tyndall Glacier in the Torres del Paine National Park, Southernmost Chile. Ph.D. Dissertation, Ruprecht-Karls-Universitat, Heidelberg.