Millions of years ago, marine reptiles may have used Nevada as a birthing ground

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Millions of years ago, marine reptiles may have used Nevada as a birthing ground
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These bus-sized ichthyosaurs looked like chunky dolphins and now lay petrified and frozen in time in Nevada.

may have poisoned the animals. But these hypotheses do not have strong scientific evidence supporting them.

“When I first visited the site in 2014, my first thought was that the best way to study it would be to create a full-color, high-resolution 3D model,” lead author Neil Kelley, an assistant professor of geology at Vanderbilt University, said. “A 3D model would allow us to study the way these large fossils were arranged in relation to one another without losing the ability to go bone by bone.”

Geochemical tests in the rock didn’t reveal any signs that these ichthyosaurs died due to a major environmental event like a harmful algal bloom that would have also disturbed the ecosystem. They expanded their search beyond Quarry 2 to the surrounding geology and fossils that scientists had previously excavated from the area.

“Once it became clear that there was nothing for them to eat here, and there were large adult Shonisaurus along with embryos and newborns but no juveniles, we started to seriously consider whether this might have been a birthing ground,”Additional analysis revealed that the ages of the many fossil beds of BISP were actually separated by at least hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions of years.

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