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Reconstruction of the earliest ichthyosaur and the 250-million-year-old ecosystem found on Spitsbergen. Credit: Illustration by Esther van Hulsen For nearly 190 years, scientists have searched for the origins of ancient sea-going reptiles from the Age of Dinosaurs. Now a team of Swedish and Norwegian paleontologists has discovered remains of the earliest known ichthyosaur or ‘fish-lizard’ on the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen. Ichthyosaurs were an extinct group of marine reptiles whose fossils have been recovered worldwide. They were amongst the first land-living animals to adapt to life in the open sea, and evolved a ‘fish-like’ body shape similar to...

Arctic environment during an ancient bout of natural global warmingScientists are unravelling the environmental changes that took place around the Arctic during an exceptional episode of ancient global warming. Newly published results from a high-resolution study of sediments collected on Spitsbergen represent a significant contribution to this endeavour. The study was led by Dr Ian Harding and Prof John Marshall of the University of Southampton’s School of Ocean and Earth Science (SOES), based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton.Around 56 million years ago there was a period of global warming called the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), during which global sea...