A rare 200 million-year-old ichthyosaur species has been discovered from a private collection, 22 years after it was originally found.
Ichthyosaurs were a type of sea-going reptiles that lived during the time of the dinosaurs.
In 2016, Dean Lomax from the University of Manchester in the UK described an ichthyosaur skeleton that he had examined in the collections of Leicester's New Walk Museum and Art Gallery.
He spotted several unusual features of the bones and determined that the features were unique and represented a new species, which he called Wahlisaurus massarae. "When Wahlisaurus was announced, I was a little nervous about what other palaeontologists would make of it, considering the new species was known only from a single specimen," Lomax said.
"My analysis suggested it was something new, but some palaeontologists questioned this and said it was just 'variation' of an existing species," he said. =READ MORE
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