Trip's Utatsusaurus (New Species)

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UTATSUSAURUS

Utatsusaurus is the earliest-known ichthyopterygian which lived in the Early Triassic period, about 245–250 million years ago). It was nearly 3 metres long with a slender body, a pointed muzzle, and an obtuse tail fin. Utatsusaurus is one of the most primitive grades of ichthyosaurs, seemingly evolving from terrestrial ancestors. Unlike the more advanced ichthyosaurs, Utatsusaurus has no dorsal fin and has a broad skull. The snout gently tapers, compared to the more rounded one of more derived ichthyopterygians The postorbital underlaps the elongate posterior process of the postfrontal.

The name Utatsusaurus was given after the city. The fossils have been found from the Early Triassic Osawa Formation of Miyagi Prefecture, Japan and British Columbia, Canada. Utatsusaurus fed on a diet of fish. It has approximately 40 presacral vertebrae which are cylindrical, suggesting that it probably swam with an eel-like motion. Ryosuke Motani from the University of California, Berkeley, and Nachio Minoura and Tatsuro Ando from Hokkaido University re-examined the fossils of Utatsusaurus in 1998 using computer imagery to reverse the distortion of the original skeleton. They found that Utatsusaurus was closely related to the lizard-like diapsid reptiles such as Petrolacosaurus, making ichthyopterygians a distant relative to lizards, snakes and crocodiles.

Utatsusaurus was a shallow marine predator, feeding off of fish and other marine organisms. It was likely not a fast swimmer, relying solely on catching prey with ambush tactics.

The climate during the Early Triassic Epoch (especially in the interior of the supercontinent Pangaea) was generally arid, rainless and dry, and deserts were widespread; however the poles possessed a temperate climate. The pole-to-equator temperature gradient was temporally flat during the Early Triassic and may have allowed tropical species to extend their distribution poleward. This is evidenced by the global distribution of ammonoids. The extremely hot ocean temperatures facilitated powerful hurricanes that frequently hit the coast of North China.

The mostly hot climate of the Early Triassic may have been caused by late volcanic eruptions of the Siberian Traps, which had probably triggered the Permian-Triassic extinction event and accelerated the rate of global warming into the Triassic. Studies suggest that Early Triassic climate was very volatile, punctuated by a number of relatively rapid global temperature changes, marine anoxic events, and carbon cycle disturbances, which led to subsequent extinction events in the aftermath of the Permian-Triassic extinction event.

This same species is available to download in JWE2! You can find it here!

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