Exploring Ichthyosaurs in the 21st Century

I was invited to talk to Bath Geological Society on 5 November 2020 – fireworks night and the beginning of Lockdown 2 (this time it’s personal) – an auspicious night indeed.

The title slide to my talk ‘Exploring Ichthyosaurs in the 21st Century’, featuring some of the specimens in the Staatliches Museum for Naturkunde Stuttgart that I visited in 2017.

This I’d intended as an insight into the last 200 years of ichthyosaur research – since the first major specimens found by Mary and Joseph Anning in 1810 – through the discovery of numerous new specimens and species, and the work of many people across the world, and onto a couple of questions that I think we are primed to consider and answer in the near future.

A very simplified ichthyosaur phylogeny – a version of this first appeared in episode 85 of palaeocast. Silhouettes taken from PhyloPic CC BY 3.0 authors Benjamin Moon, Dmitry Bogdanov, T. Michael Keesey, Gareth Monger, and Zimices.

I covered a few different things:

• The origin and early evolution of ichthyosaurs – considering the time frame in which the earliest ichthyosaurs appeared and how quickly they diversified.
• Adaptations that ichthyosaurs have to life in the water – including their streamlined body shape, snapping skull, and giving birth to live young.
• Where ichthyosaurs fit in the diversity of other marine reptiles – how this changed through their evolution and towards their eventual extinction.
• How new finds and more detailed studies on singled deposits can show the diversity of single ecosystems affected by single events.
• Prospects for expanding single comparisons within clades to analyses that incorporate and compare the evolution of multiple groups that transitioned from land into water.