From the description (abstract?) from a while back for “New fossil reveals early and rapid evolution of giant Mesozoic ichthyosaurs,” Martin Sanders, et al, an article published in Science, but this description published on EurekaAlert!:
Although whales are now the largest of Earth’s creatures, they were not the first ocean giants to ply the seas. In a new study, researchers report the discovery of new and exceptionally large ichthyosaur fossils, which hint at an early and rapid burst in the evolution of extreme body size in Mesozoic oceans. While it took whales about 90% of their 55-million-year history to evolve into the ocean giants we know today, ichthyosaurs evolved to similar sizes in the first 1% of their 150-million-year history on Earth. The findings suggest that Triassic marine food webs could support such massive creatures, despite the absence of many primary producers following the Permian extinction 252 million years ago.
All it takes is finding an ichthyosaur fossil a hundred million years earlier to mess up the conclusions.
But upon finding a unique fossil, conclusions have to be drawn, don’t they? If only to challenge the current wisdom, to get researchers thinking and questioning assumptions.
And the skull of this specimen is bigger than me. There’s a bunch of pics out there, but I think they’re all protected under copyright, so I’ll let them be. Here’s a useful search.
