{"id":31163,"date":"2025-07-06T09:00:05","date_gmt":"2025-07-06T09:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=31163"},"modified":"2025-07-06T09:23:38","modified_gmt":"2025-07-06T09:23:38","slug":"fiona-the-pregnant-sea-reptiles-fossil-hints-at-the-birth-of-a-new-ocean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=31163","title":{"rendered":"Fiona the Pregnant Sea Reptile\u2019s Fossil Hints at the Birth of a New Ocean"},"content":{"rendered":"
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An ichthyosaur preserved beneath a Chilean glacier is helping scientists understand the extinct animals and the world around them as a supercontinent broke up.<\/p>\n

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About 131 million years ago, a pregnant ichthyosaur \u2014 a dolphin-like reptile of the dinosaur era \u2014 swam in seas that are now part of southern Chile. And then she died.<\/p>\n

An accomplice in the killing: the breakup of the southern supercontinent of Gondwanaland.<\/p>\n

South America, once unified with Africa and Antarctica, pulled away, and a new ocean basin called the Roca Verdes opened up.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the hypotheses is that this is actually the opening of the early South Atlantic Ocean,\u201d said Matthew Malkowski, a professor of geological sciences at the University of Texas at Austin.<\/p>\n

The geological forces that pulled apart the continents also ruptured the Earth\u2019s crust, causing volcanoes and earthquakes, and those earthquakes sometimes set off massive underwater landslides.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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One day in the early Cretaceous period, one of those landslides collapsed down a submarine canyon in Roca Verdes, generating turbulent flows of sediment.<\/p>\n

\u201cProbably these landslides might have trapped the ichthyosaurs and threw them to the bottom of the canyon and covered them with sediment,\u201d said Judith Pardo-P\u00e9rez, an associate professor at the University of Magallanes in Chile.<\/p>\n

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An ichthyosaur preserved beneath a Chilean glacier is helping scientists understand the extinct animals and the world around them as a supercontinent broke up.About 131 million years ago, a pregnant ichthyosaur \u2014 a dolphin-like reptile of the dinosaur era \u2014 swam in seas that are now part of southern Chile. And then she died.An accomplice in the killing: the breakup of the southern supercontinent of Gondwanaland.South America, once unified with Africa and Antarctica, pulled away, and a new ocean basin called the Roca Verdes opened up.\u201cOne of the hypotheses is that this is actually the opening of the early South Atlantic Ocean,\u201d said Matthew Malkowski, a professor of geological sciences at the University of Texas at Austin.The geological forces that pulled apart the continents also ruptured the Earth\u2019s crust, causing volcanoes and earthquakes, and those earthquakes sometimes set off massive underwater landslides.One day in the early Cretaceous period, one of those landslides collapsed down a submarine canyon in Roca Verdes, generating turbulent flows of sediment.\u201cProbably these landslides might have trapped the ichthyosaurs and threw them to the bottom of the canyon and covered them with sediment,\u201d said Judith Pardo-P\u00e9rez, an associate professor at the University of Magallanes in Chile.We 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":31165,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31163","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\/31163","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=31163"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31166,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31163\/revisions\/31166"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/31165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}