Scientists have discovered a massive tooth from an enormous, fish-like animal that lived around 205 million years ago. They say the creature it belonged to – a marine reptile called an ichthyosaur – may have been one of the largest of its kind.
Ichthyosaurs were reptiles – members of the same large animal group that includes today’s crocodiles, lizards and turtles. From around 250 million years ago, in a prehistoric period called the Triassic, they began to split into types with different lifestyles, giving rise to plant-eating and meat-eating dinosaurs on land, and flying hunters called pterosaurs in the air. Others took to the seas, evolving and adapting over millions of years into lots of forms. Ichthyosaurs were the earliest of these, and had a streamlined (shaped to move smoothly…
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