Manchester palaeontologist discovers new species of 200 million-year-old British marine reptile
A new type of ichthyosaur, an extinct marine reptile alive at the same time as the dinosaurs, has been identified by a Manchester palaeontologist from a fossil found in an old quarry in Nottinghamshire. Similar-shaped to dolphins and sharks, ichthyosaurs - often misidentified as ‘swimming dinosaurs’ - swam the seas of the Earth for millions of years during the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. The Nottinghamshire fossil is from the earliest part of the Jurassic Period - 200 million years ago - and only a handful of ichthyosaur species are known from this period, making the