Attenborough and the Sea Dragon Page #6

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A sighting by Chris on

the beach in Lyme Regis

has led to the discovery of a

new species of ichthyosaur,

adding to our knowledge of

these fascinating creatures.

It's extraordinary how much you can

discover from one single fossil.

Digital reconstruction has allowed us

to rebuild this animal to reveal

how it looked and how it moved.

We've discovered, for the first time,

that this creature was countershaded.

But that didn't stop it

from being attacked.

By analysing its bones,

we've been able to work out

that its most likely attacker

was a temnodontosaurus,

the most ferocious predator

of the seas at that time.

It's been a fascinating journey

of discovery, but, for me,

the real wonder is the bones themselves.

I can't wait to see what they look

like when they're finally cleaned.

After many months of painstaking

and patient preparation,

Chris and his team have

finally completed their work

on the fossil of our ancient sea dragon.

Here it is finished.

Wow!

It's really beautiful, isn't it?

- I mean, it is beautiful, that's for sure.

- Thank you.

- It's a great specimen, isn't it?

- Lovely.

And how many new species have been

discovered in the last 100 years?

Very few, very, very few

and it's thrilling to find something

that's just never been seen before.

Well, it was a long time spent

just revealing the body of this creature,

but it's also revealed

this extraordinary story

of life and death,

predator-prey fighting it out in the seas

200 million years ago just down there.

Yeah, it's a fantastic story.

Really, really thrilling and romantic.

For Chris, this has been a labour of love

and it's filled in another gap

in the palaeontological jigsaw...

a story that all started

with an odd-looking boulder

on a Dorset beach.

It's extraordinary to think

that some 200 million

years ago exactly here,

the greatest predator of its time

was swimming around in the sea

and that's what I really love

about fossils and fossil hunting.

It gives you an

extraordinarily vivid insight

into what the world was like

millions of years before

human beings even appeared on this planet.

Ichthyosaurs died out around

90 million years ago.

No-one knows why,

but standing here and having

excavated that spectacular fossil,

it's not difficult to imagine a time

when dragons really did rule the seas.

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