Prof Judy Massare, an ichthyosaur expert from State University of New York, praised the update but said there were still questions around the ichthyosaur species.<\/p>\n
“Thousands of complete or nearly complete ichthyosaur skeletons are known from before and after the Pliensbachian.<\/p>\n
“Clearly, a major change in species diversity occurred sometime in the Pliensbachian.”<\/p>\n
She added: “Xiphodracon helps to determine when the change occurred, but we still don’t know why.”<\/p>\n
Dr Lomax, whose new book The Secret Lives of Dinosaurs has been endorsed by the Guns N’ Roses guitarist, Slash, said: “One of the coolest things about identifying a new species is that you get to name it.<\/p>\n
“We opted for xiphodracon because of the long, sword-like snout, and dracon in reference to ichthyosaurs being referred to as ‘sea dragons’ for over 200 years,” he said.<\/p>\n
He explained the “xipho” portion of the title has been taken from the Greek word for sword, xiphos, and “dracon” comes from the Greek and Latin word for dragon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Prof Judy Massare, an ichthyosaur expert from State University of New York, praised the update but said there…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":488733,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[70,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-488732","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=488732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488732\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/488733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=488732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=488732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=488732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}