Extraordinary ichthyosaur fossil shows its last meal was a pterosaur
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- Fossil hunters found the ichthyosaur's bones at a public site near Richmond, Queensland in 2019; palaeontologists returned in 2022 to excavate the nearly 7-metre Platypterygius australis specimen.
- Globular masses near the ichthyosaur's skull, revealed through mechanical removal of rock and 3D imaging, contained fish, squid-like cephalopods, and two pterosaur bones including a jaw fragment — the first direct evidence any ichthyosaur ate a pterosaur.
- Crushing bite marks, split vertebrae and missing ribs led researchers to conclude the ichthyosaur itself was ripped apart by the giant pliosaur Kronosaurus queenslandicus, the only predator in the Eromanga Sea capable of inflicting such damage.
- The pterosaur jaw fragment suggests the flying reptile was roughly the size of the largest living albatrosses, with wingspans up to 4 metres.
- David Unwin at the University of Leicester characterised the ichthyosaur as "a super-scavenger of the seas, not fussy about what it ate and happily hoovering up the dead, the dying and the decaying."
- The findings, published in Gondwana Research, document a rare three-tiered Cretaceous food chain from the Eromanga Sea — a shallow inland sea that once covered over a third of Australia.
Why it matters: Palaeontologists rarely capture predator-prey behaviour in stone, and this specimen preserves a complete three-tiered Cretaceous food chain — pterosaur consumed by ichthyosaur, ichthyosaur consumed by pliosaur. The gut contents reframe ichthyosaurs as opportunistic super-scavengers rather than selective hunters, with Dean Lomax calling it "a window into ancient food webs."
