{"id":21694,"date":"2025-02-06T15:00:12","date_gmt":"2025-02-06T16:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=21694"},"modified":"2025-02-06T16:23:34","modified_gmt":"2025-02-06T16:23:34","slug":"plesiosaur-fossils-preserve-both-skin-and-scales-on-ancient-sea-monster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=21694","title":{"rendered":"Plesiosaur Fossils Preserve Both Skin and Scales on Ancient Sea Monster"},"content":{"rendered":"
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With serpentine necks, flippers and a mouth full of needle-sharp teeth, plesiosaurs have captured imaginations since paleontologists uncovered the first specimen more than two centuries ago. Their skeletal anatomy is well documented, but their external appearance has largely remained a mystery.<\/p>\n

Now researchers have conducted the first detailed analysis of plesiosaur soft tissue, offering a more complete look at what these real-life sea monsters might have looked like when they lived from 215 million to 66 million years ago.<\/p>\n

Published Thursday in Current Biology<\/a>, the findings suggest that some plesiosaurs had humanlike skin on their tail regions and fishy scales on their flippers, similar to the features of some living sea turtle species. The research highlights an evolutionary detour that runs counter to other ancient marine reptiles like ichthyosaurs and mosasaurs, which evolved away from scales in favor of skin, or much smaller scales, to allow them to move more efficiently through their marine habitats.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are iconic animals, and the way we reconstruct them hasn\u2019t changed for nearly 200 years, so this is a big update,\u201d said Miguel Marx, a doctoral student at Lund University in Sweden and lead author of the paper. \u201cIt changes our perspective on their evolutionary history and how they adapted to life in the ocean.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Mr. Marx and colleagues analyzed three soft-tissue skin samples, each about the size of a fingernail, from a flipper and the tail of a 183 million-year-old long-necked plesiosaur specimen. The species is to be named in a future peer-reviewed paper. But the samples came from the Posidonia Shale in Germany, where the ocean chemistry preserved soft tissues. That left it frozen in time. Some of the tissue remains were so flawlessly fossilized that researchers could see skin cell nuclei under the microscope.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Skeleton of the new plesiosaur at the Urwelt-Museum Hauff in Holzmaden, Germany.<\/span>Klaus Nilkens\/Urwelt-Museum Hauff<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
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Skin from the bottom half of the tail in the new plesiosaur.<\/span>Klaus Nilkens\/Urwelt-Museum Hauff<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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With serpentine necks, flippers and a mouth full of needle-sharp teeth, plesiosaurs have captured imaginations since paleontologists uncovered the first specimen more than two centuries ago. Their skeletal anatomy is well documented, but their external appearance has largely remained a mystery.Now researchers have conducted the first detailed analysis of plesiosaur soft tissue, offering a more complete look at what these real-life sea monsters might have looked like when they lived from 215 million to 66 million years ago.Published Thursday in Current Biology, the findings suggest that some plesiosaurs had humanlike skin on their tail regions and fishy scales on their flippers, similar to the features of some living sea turtle species. The research highlights an evolutionary detour that runs counter to other ancient marine reptiles like ichthyosaurs and mosasaurs, which evolved away from scales in favor of skin, or much smaller scales, to allow them to move more efficiently through their marine habitats.\u201cThese are iconic animals, and the way we reconstruct them hasn\u2019t changed for nearly 200 years, so this is a big update,\u201d said Miguel Marx, a doctoral student at Lund University in Sweden and lead author of the paper. \u201cIt changes our perspective on their evolutionary history and how they adapted to life in the ocean.\u201dMr. Marx and colleagues analyzed three soft-tissue skin samples, each about the size of a fingernail, from a flipper and the tail of a 183 million-year-old long-necked plesiosaur specimen. The species is to be named in a future peer-reviewed paper. But the samples came from the Posidonia Shale in Germany, where the ocean chemistry preserved soft tissues. That left it frozen in time. Some of the tissue remains were so flawlessly fossilized that researchers could see skin cell nuclei under the microscope.Skeleton of the new plesiosaur at the Urwelt-Museum Hauff in Holzmaden, Germany.Klaus Nilkens\/Urwelt-Museum HauffSkin from the bottom half of the tail in the new plesiosaur.Klaus Nilkens\/Urwelt-Museum HauffWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21696,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21694"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21694\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21697,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21694\/revisions\/21697"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}