BRENT: A fossil stored in a Doncaster museum for 30 years and thought to be a plaster copy has turned out to be a new species of ancient reptile.
A young palaeontologist working with the University of Manchester found the fossil in 2008, in the collections of Doncaster Museum and Art Gallery.
He realised it was the 189-million-year-old remains of an ichthyosaur – an extinct marine reptile.
Further study confirmed it to be a previously unknown species.
The finding has now been published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
Dean Lomax, the 25-year-old palaeontologist who studied the specimen, said it was so well preserved he could determine the contents of its stomach.
“We could see tiny hook-shaped features that were actually the hooks from the tentacles of squid,” he said.
“So we know what its last meal was.”
Mr Lomax worked with Prof Judy Massare, from the State University of New York, comparing the specimen’s fossilised bones with those of almost 1,000 other ichthyosaurs in museums in the US and Europe.
Mr Lomax explained that subtle anatomical features in its fin bones set the species apart from others.
