A 246-million-year-old reptile fossil discovered by scientists in New Zealand has been confirmed as the oldest marine reptile fossil ever found in the Southern Hemisphere, according to a Swedish museum.
The vertebrae of a Nothosaurus, a type of sauropod-finned aquatic reptile that lived during the Triassic Period, the beginning of the dinosaurs, were first unearthed from rock in 1978 but went unidentified until recently, according to a statement from the Museum of Evolution at Uppsala University in Sweden.
About 252 million years ago, reptiles invaded the oceans after the devastating mass extinction that ushered in the age of the dinosaurs.
“Evidence for this evolutionary milestone has only been found in a few places around the world, including the Arctic island of Spitsbergen, northwestern North America and southwestern China,” the university said.
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An artist’s depiction of a nothosaurus that swam near what is now New Zealand 246 million years ago. (Stavros Kundromichalis/Museum of Evolution, Uppsala University)
The vertebrae were unearthed from a riverbed boulder at the base of Mount Harper on New Zealand’s South Island, the statement said, adding: “This discovery sheds new light on a previously unknown record of early marine reptiles from the Southern Hemisphere.”
Nothosaurus was an ancestor of the plesiosaurs, which grew to lengths of nearly 23 feet. Plesiosaurs first appeared about 203 million years ago.
A huge fossil of a plesiosaur at the Natural History Museum in London. Nothosaurus is the ancestor of the plesiosaur. (Photo by Mike Kemp/via Getty Images)
Nothosaurus swam on its four limbs and had conical teeth for catching fish and squid.
“The New Zealand nothosaurus was discovered during a geological survey in 1978, but its importance was not fully recognised until palaeontologists from Sweden, Norway, New Zealand, Australia and Timor-Leste combined their expertise to examine and analyse vertebrae and other associated fossils,” the university said.
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The nothosaurus fossil is more than 40 million years older than any sauropteran fossil yet found in the Southern Hemisphere, lead author of the study, Dr Benjamin Keir, a palaeontologist at Uppsala University, said in a statement.
“We find that these ancient marine reptiles lived in shallow coastal environments rich in marine life within the Antarctic Circle at that time,” he said.
A Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton is on display in the Dinosaur Gallery of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels on April 7, 2023. (Thierry Monasse/Getty Images)
He said the fossil completely overturns scientists’ understanding of how nothosaurus swam from one end of the Earth to the other.
“Using a time-calibrated evolutionary model of the global distribution of sauropods, we show that nothosaurs originated near the equator and then rapidly spread north and south, coinciding with the re-establishment of complex marine ecosystems after the mass extinction that marked the beginning of the Age of Dinosaurs,” Keir said.
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He added that “extreme global warming” at the dawn of the age of the dinosaurs “allowed these marine reptiles to thrive in Antarctica. This also suggests that the ancient polar regions may have been a route for their first global migration, similar to the epic trans-oceanic journeys undertaken by modern whales. There are surely plenty of fossils of long-extinct sea monsters still waiting to be discovered in New Zealand and elsewhere in the Southern Hemisphere.”
