Fossils from some of the largest creatures ever to swim Earth's oceans - whale-sized marine reptiles called ichthyosaurs - have been found in a counterintuitive place: atop three mountains in the Swiss Alps up to 8,990 feet (2,740 meters) above sea level.
Scientists on Thursday described rib and vertebrae fossils from two ichthyosaur individuals: one about 69 feet long and the other about 49 feet . They described from a third individual the largest-known tooth from any ichthyosaur with a base 2.4 inches wide and an estimated length of 6 inches , suggestive of a fearsome predator.
The animal likely was not that big but still formidable, perhaps akin to a sperm whale, hunting giant squid, large fish and smaller ichthyosaurs. Some other giant ichthyosaurs apparently lacked teeth and ate small fish and squid, sucking them up or engulfing them in their mouths. The fossils were found in the 1970s and 1980s at three sites in the eastern Alps in Switzerland, said study co-author Heinz Furrer, a retired curator at the University of Zurich's Paleontological Institute and Museum who discovered them along with other geology students at the time. The fossils are being described scientifically for the first time.
"The Alps have a very complicated structure, with giant slabs of rock consisting of former seafloor, called nappes, piled on top of each other by the African plate pushing into the European plate. The nappe that the ichthyosaurs come from is the highest in the pile. This piling up happened in the last 35 million years or so," Sander said.
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