Skeletal pathologies track body plan evolution in ichthyosaurs

I read a paper, Skeletal pathologies track body plan evolution in ichthyosaurs, by Judith M Pardo-Pérez, Benjamin P Kear, Erin E Maxwell

An interesting paper, made possible by a 150 million year fossil record of a single clade of reptiles, ichthyosaurs. There’s a number of interesting things about ichthyosaurs, one of them is a pretty decent record of physical evolution over those 150 million years. By simple counting of pathological bone fossils, the authors show that early, mosasaur like ichthyosaurs had different injuries than later, porpoise-shaped ichthyosaurs. They attribute this to body shapes changing the kind of behaviors these animals exhibited.

Once again, we see paleontologists checking every fact about the fossils they find, and cross-referencing everything.

Official Citation

Pardo-Pérez, J.M., Kear, B.P. & Maxwell, E.E Skeletal pathologies track body plan evolution in ichthyosaurs. Sci Rep 10, 4206 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-61070-7