BRAUNSCHWEIG, Germany, Jan. 5 (UPI) -- German paleontologists say they identified a species of prehistoric marine giant from a time when that family of reptiles was thought mostly to have died out.
Researchers from the State Natural History Museum in Braunschweig said the rare fossil ichthyosaur find from northern Germany is 130 million years old, dating from the Lower Cretaceous era. Most ichthyosaur fossils previously found date from the Jurassic era, millions of years earlier.