Although you might assume that specimens in a museum's collection have already been "discovered," important new details can still turn up on closer study. That was the case with a plesiosaur skeleton that had been sitting in a German museum for more than 50 years, as a new investigation discovered that not only did the bones belong to a new species, but the animal was the oldest of its kind.
Discovered in a clay pit in Sarstedt, Germany, back in 1964, the bones had been part of a collection at the Lower Saxony State Museum in Hannover for decades. The skeleton included most of the skull, some vertebrae, ribs and bones from the creature's flippers, making it clear that they belonged to some kind of plesiosaur, a group of marine reptiles that lived alongside the dinosaurs.=READ MORE
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