After being in front of us for decades (or rather, under our feet), a new species of sea monster from the Early Jurassic has been identified by a team of German (Naturkunde-Museum Bielefeld from Germany) and Swedish (from the University of Uppsala) and whose finding is collected by the magazine Alcheringa.
This new species of prehistoric monster has been named Arminisaurus schuberti , in honor of the German paleontologist Siegfried Schubert and the Germanic chief Arminius (who annihilated the Roman army of Publius Quintilius Varus in the battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD). His fossilized remains were found in a clay pit near the city of Bielefeld in Germany.
The predator’s bones have had to overcome several obstacles before being identified, because although the fossils were originally discovered in a clay pit near Bielefeld in Germany in the 1980s , the intact and complete skeleton was broken by excavation machinery. Only 40% of his bones could be recovered.
He would later be rescued by the intervention of the avid amateur paleontologist Siegfried Schubert, who thoroughly and thoroughly cleaned the bones and sent them to the Naturkunde-Museum Bielefeld in 2015, hence the plesiosaur is named after him.
“Plesiosaurs were among the most successful marine predators of the Age of Dinosaurs. Some, like the famous Liopleurodon , were colossal predators up to 15 meters long, which were the equivalent of white sharks and killer whales in the oceans of the present time “, exposes Sven Sachs, co-author of the work.
In comparison, the Arminisaurus schuberti was considerably smaller, at about 3-4 meters long; it swam the Jurassic oceans 190 million years ago and likely hunted fish, squid, and other small prey in the ancient seas that covered Germany during the Jurassic period. However, an almost complete bone of the scapula has revealed an interesting fact: the Arminisaurus schuberti has the so-called ‘scapular platform’, a characteristic that it has in common with the plesiosaurs of the Cretaceous period that followed the Jurassic.
This data is relevant because it dates from an earlier period within the Jurassic, where few plesiosaur fossils have been discovered.
“Only two other plesiosaur fossils have been named in this mysterious evolutionary interval of the plesiosaur order, making Arminisaurus a very important new addition to the group’s global record ,” the authors clarify.
The discovery could help paleontologists better understand the evolutionary radiation (or divergent evolution) of these reptiles that appeared in the early Jurassic period and lasted until the KT extinction at the end of the Cretaceous.
“ Arminisaurus schuberti is significant because it dates from an early Jurassic time period, during which we have very few identifiable plesiosaur fossils,” emphasizes researcher Benjamin Kear from the Museum of Evolution at Uppsala University in Sweden.
Reference: Sven Sachs et al. A rare new Pliensbachian plesiosaurian from the Amaltheenton Formation of Bielefeld in northwestern Germany, Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology (2017). DOI: 10.1080 / 03115518.2017.1367419
Image credit: Joschua Knüppe / Uppsala University
