Attenborough and the Sea Dragon: A remarkable 200-million-year-old fossil – the bones of an ichthyosaur, a giant sea dragon – has been discovered on the Jurassic coast of Britain. David Attenborough joins the hunt to bring this ancient creature’s story to life. Using state-of-the-art imaging technology and CGI, the team reconstruct the skeleton and create the most detailed animation of an ichthyosaur ever made. Along the way, the team stumble into a 200-million-year-old murder mystery – and only painstaking forensic investigation can unravel the story of this extraordinary creature’s fate.
In the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, there are some of the most massive jaws ever discovered: the giant head of an ichthyosaur called Temnodontosaurus (tem – no – don – toe – sore – us), found almost 200 years ago by Mary Anning near Lyme Regis, Dorset; not far from where our ichthyosaur was found. The length of this skull is over 1.5 m, and its missing bits – the complete skull may have been over 2 m long. While we don’t have the whole body, we can estimate that this Temnodontosaurus was around 8–10 m in length: one of the largest ichthyosaurs ever discovered! The skull of ichthyosaurs one of its most important parts. This is where the action goes on: the biting and eating that it may have spent much of its time doing.
Attenborough and the Sea Dragon
Ichthyosaurs are large extinct marine reptiles. Ichthyosaurs belong to the order known as Ichthyosauria or Ichthyopterygia (‘fish flippers’ – a designation introduced by Sir Richard Owen in 1842, although the term is now used more for the parent clade of the Ichthyosauria).
Ichthyosaurs thrived during much of the Mesozoic era; based on fossil evidence, they first appeared around 250 million years ago (Ma) and at least one species survived until about 90 million years ago, into the Late Cretaceous. During the Early Triassic epoch, ichthyosaurs evolved from a group of unidentified land reptiles that returned to the sea, in a development similar to how the mammalian land-dwelling ancestors of modern-day dolphins and whales returned to the sea millions of years later, which they gradually came to resemble in a case of convergent evolution.
Ichthyosaurs were particularly abundant in the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic periods, until they were replaced as the top aquatic predators by another marine reptilian group, the Plesiosauria, in the later Jurassic and Early Cretaceous, though previous views of ichthyosaur decline during this period are probably overstated. Ichthyosaurs diversity declined due to environmental volatility caused by climatic upheavals in the early Late Cretaceous, becoming extinct around the Cenomanian-Turonian boundary.
Science became aware of the existence of ichthyosaurs during the early nineteenth century, when the first complete skeletons were found in England. In 1834, the order Ichthyosauria was named. Later that century, many excellently preserved ichthyosaur fossils were discovered in Germany, including soft-tissue remains. Since the late twentieth century, there has been a revived interest in the group, leading to an increased number of named ichthyosaurs from all continents, with over fifty valid genera being now known.
