‘Sword Dragon’ ichthyosaur had enormous eyes and a lethal snout

Meet the “Sword Dragon”, a newly named species of ichthyosaur – the predatory prehistoric reptiles that dominated the oceans while dinosaurs ruled the land.

The perfectly preserved fossilized skeleton was found on the UK's Jurassic Coast near an area called the Golden Cap back in 2001 and has been kept in collections for many years Royal Ontario Museum in Canada.

“They knew it was something interesting,” says Dean Lomax at the University of Manchester, UK. “They were going to work on it, but they never did.”

Lomax and his colleagues have now prepared and identified the specimen, which has a huge eye socket and a long, sword-like snout. The fossil also has “needle-like piercing teeth.” [that] are largely designed to eat soft prey such as squid and fish,” says Lomax. “You can get a good idea of ​​what this thing would look like in real life by basically relying on really good eyesight when hunting, probably in dark conditions.”

The animal was about 3 meters long – the size of an ordinary bottlenose dolphin – and lived during the Early Jurassic period, called the Pliensbachian, approximately 193–184 million years ago.

It has features that have never been seen before in ichthyosaurs, including a unique bone around the nostril called the lacrimal, with jagged structures. “The level of three-dimensional preservation, especially of the cranial sutures and delicate structures such as the lacrimal and prefrontal projections, is exceptional,” says Aubrey Roberts at the Natural History Museum of the University of Oslo in Norway.

The dark mass between the ribs may have been his last meal, but the team was unable to determine what it was.

Because of the deadly appearance of its snout, researchers gave the ichthyosaur the name Xyphodragon golden capensisor the Golden Cap Dragon Sword.

The sample also reveals something about ichthyosaur evolution. “The main significance of this find is its age,” says Roberts. At the end of the Triassic period there were huge superpredators ichthyosaurslike Ichthititan – supposedly its length is almost 25 meters, the size of a blue whale. But these giant reptiles disappeared from the fossil record after the end-Triassic extinction event about 201.4 million years ago, which also marks the beginning of the Jurassic period.

According to Lomax, remains of a variety of smaller ichthyosaurs have been found dating back to the Jurassic period. Many of them are known before the Pliensbachian period and many after it, but there are two completely different types that have no common species.

“Triassic ichthyosaurs were notoriously strange,” says Neil Kelly at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. “And their Jurassic descendants were often considered a little more 'alike' because they had a superficially similar appearance to dolphins.”

“Xiphodragon adds another layer to the broader rainbow of ichthyosaurs,” he says, demonstrating that Jurassic ichthyosaurs had varied lifestyles, with different diets, swimming speeds and preferred habitats.

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