THE fossilised body of an ichthyosaur has revealed that the giant marine reptiles had a more varied diet than we realised, a finding that challenges our ideas about why they went extinct.
Ichthyosaurs were thought to feed mainly on squid-like creatures called belemnites, and some researchers have suggested that an overspecialised diet might have brought about their demise. But Benjamin Kear and his team at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, have found that a 100-million-year-old female Platypterygius longmani in Queensland has exceptionally well-preserved gut contents (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2003.0050). They include bones from an…
