Ichthyosaur Graveyard Research

• ichthyosaurs, a group of marine reptiles, were found bunched together in the middle of the Nevada desert.
• The paleontologists propose a new interpretation of this site, which is that the ichthyosaurs were coming to give birth.
• The new research is an extension of what Pyenson and other researchers have studied at places like Cerro Ballena in Chile's Atacama Desert.
• There, paleontologists have found dozens of skeletons of prehistoric whales and other marine mammals that appear to have died during toxic algal blooms and washed onto a tidal flat.
• Pyenson and colleagues wanted to see if something similar had happened at Berlin-Ichthyosaur and applied some of the same research techniques.
• The multiyear effort created a digital data set of the site that allowed for a broader analysis than simply looking at museum specimens.
• "It's a really fascinating site, and it's exciting to see new research being focused on this important ichthyosaur graveyard," says University of Manchester paleontologist Dean Lomax.
• The Berlin-Ichthyosaur site has yielded the remains of many large, predatory marine reptiles, including Shonisaurus.
• The site lacks evidence of cannibalism, which suggests that the marine reptiles hunted and fed elsewhere and deposited their babies in the warm, relatively predator-free waters of what eventually became Berlin-Ichthyosaur.
• The paleontologists propose that Shonisaurus did their hunting and feeding elsewhere and deposited their babies in the warm, relatively predator-free waters of what eventually became Berlin-Ichthyosaur.
• If the paleontologists’ migratory hypothesis is correct, then Shonisaurus returned to the same area time and again to give birth over during a span of more than 100,000 years.
• Precisely why so many Shonisaurus perished and were buried in this relatively small geographic area is unclear.

Explore the new research and interpretations of the Berlin-Ichthyosaur site, a graveyard of marine reptiles in the Nevada desert. Learn about the proposed migratory patterns and birthing behaviors of Shonisaurus and the findings that led to these conclusions.