The retreat of Chile’s Tyndall Glacier has revealed a graveyard of ichthyosaurs, dolphin-like reptiles that roamed the oceans more than 90 million years ago.
The retreat of Chile’s Tyndall Glacier has revealed a graveyard of ichthyosaurs, dolphin-like reptiles that roamed the oceans more than 90 million years ago.
The Tyndall Glacier is melting, with parts retreating by as much as 2 kilometers in recent decades, exposing long-hidden fossils. So far, paleontologists have uncovered the remains of 76 ichthyosaurs in bedrock left bare by melting, a trend highlighted in newly released satellite images from NASA comparing the glacier in 1986 and today.
“I’m certain that many of the specimens were under the glacier in the 1986 image,” Dean Lomax, a paleontologist at the University of Manchester. “To our knowledge, there is no other site in the world where so many exceptional fossils are being exposed due to a retreating glacier.”
Read more at Yale Environment 360
Photo Credit: Michael Murphy via Wikimedia Commons
