Attenborough and the Sea Dragon (2018) - full transcript

The remains of a dragon

have just been discovered

in the cliffs on the

South Coast of England.

It was an enormous marine reptile

that ruled the seas at the same time

as the dinosaurs ruled the land.

Scientifically,

it's called an ichthyosaur.

The bones are so well-preserved, it

may be able to give us new insights

into the lives of these

remarkable creatures.

Together with a team of scientists,

we will reconstruct the skeleton

and compare it to

animals alive today.

We'll try to understand how it looked

and how it survived in the open ocean.

Could this be a completely

new species of ichthyosaur?

Our search for

evidence will lead us

into an intriguing forensic

investigation into how it died.

I think you're lookin' at a 200

million-year-old murder mystery.

Solving that mystery will throw light on the

extraordinary world of the Jurassic ocean.

ATTENBOROUGH AND THE SEA DRAGON

The story of this extraordinary

dragon starts here in Dorset,

on the South Coast of England, one of the

most important geological sites in the world:

the Jurassic Coast.

It stretches for almost 100

miles from Devon to Dorset.

And it was here that the early

geologists first collected evidence

that, once, the world was

ruled by monstrous reptiles,

quite unlike anything

alive on Earth today.

Evidence of creatures that

existed all that time ago

can still be found

on these beaches.

Fossil collectors have been coming

here for, literally, centuries

and these rapidly eroding cliffs

are providing them with a continuous

supply of exciting things to find.

I started looking for

fossils when I was a boy

and I've never lost the feeling

of excitement and anticipation

of what one might discover.

The commonest fossils here are

coiled shells called ammonites

and you can find them

all over the place.

There's one here on this boulder.

You can see the whorls there, but

it's mostly been worn away by the sea.

But sometimes, if you're lucky,

you can find nodules like this

and, if you look at them, you can see

there's the edge there of an ammonite

and, if I hit it... I'd better

put on protective glasses.

If I hit it, it should...

How about that?

What a find!

Ammonites, in fact, are quite common on

this beach, but, every now and again,

something truly rare and

spectacular is found here,

and quite often by this man, one of

the most skilled fossil hunters I know.

Chris Moore has been collecting

fossils here for more than 30 years.

Recently, he came across a boulder which,

he thought, might contain something unusual.

Back in his workshop, he exposed a mosaic

of small, beautifully preserved bones

which he knew straightaway were the front

fins, the paddles, of an ichthyosaur.

But they were unlike any

he had ever seen before.

I still collect fossils.

I even have the remains

of an ichthyosaur,

a small one,

of a kind that's relatively common.

This was collected by Chris

about 10 years ago in Dorset.

I never found anything

as beautiful as this.

It's got jaws and it's got

teeth and it's got paddles.

And Dorset was the very first place where

they found a really complete skeleton

of one of these creatures.

This is a picture of it,

published for the very

first time in 1814.

People thought it was some kind

of monster, but what was it?

They thought it was a kind of

cross between a reptile and a fish,

so they called it an ichthyosaur,

a "fish lizard,"

or "sea dragon."

Since that time, many fossil

fragments of ichthyosaurs

have been discovered on

the Jurassic Coast...

but complete skeletons

are very rare.

The particular one that Chris has

just found is significantly different

from any that's ever

been found here before.

Chris shows me where he believes the

rest of the ichthyosaur's body is:

in the cliff, above the part of the

beach where he found the paddles.

It's in a limestone layer

near the top of the cliff

and, to reach it, Chris will

have to remove tons of clay.

In Jurassic times,

sea covered all this area.

On its floor,

sediments washed down from the land

turned into layers of

shales and limestone.

The land rose, the sea retreated, and,

now, in the rocks, you can find the remains

of the creatures that once

lived in those ancient waters.

As well as the remains of ammonites, there

are the bones of fish, such as sharks.

But the top predators at this

time were reptiles, ichthyosaurs.

They dominated the seas for

more than 150 million years.

After getting permission to dig,

the team clamber down the cliff,

to the particular layer where the rest of

our ichthyosaur skeleton should be lying.

I'm gonna need at least another meter

'cause I need to drop down to the next bit.

It's dangerous work: These cliffs

occasionally collapse without warning.

To make sure that they don't

damage any of the fossils,

the team do all the

digging by hand.

There's just loads of roots.

Tons of clay have to be removed before

they even reach the layer of limestone

where they hope the rest

of the bones still lie.

Hooray!

It was on this very same coastline,

more than 200 years ago,

that the first complete skeleton

of an ichthyosaur was discovered.

It was found by a self-taught fossil

hunter called Mary Anning in 1811.

It was then, that the popular name sea dragon

was given to these prehistoric monsters.

Scientists speculated on how they

lived and artists tried to imagine

what they must have looked

like and how they behaved.

Back at the cliff face,

Chris and his team are hard at it,

but,

they haven't found any more bones.

This is a massive piece, tomb stone.

- Right, ready.

Chris is convinced that the skeleton

to which the paddles belonged

must be somewhere here,

and they check every rock.

Beautiful shale.

Lovely.

- Anything interesting? - Moment of truth.

Nothing.

- Just push it off. - Yeah.

Is there anything showing?

- Nothin' obvious.

Gosh, that's hard work.

I hope there's something here.

I almost don't want to look.

There's a bone. - Loads of bones

going all the way. There's bone there.

There's something here.

- No, it's all the way along.

At long last,

the team's efforts are rewarded.

We've got some bones here!

- Yeah. Loads here.

There's loads of bones.

- Fantastic.

What's this? Is that a vertebrae?

But the bones are not in the position

the team had expected to find them.

Instead of lying across

the face of the cliff,

the skeleton seems to

be bending back into it.

We're gonna have to go down through there.

- It means much more work.

And, to make matters worse,

a storm is brewing.

The rain's just starting, but, I think

we've got to make a bit of a run for it.

Rough seas and heavy

downpours can cause landslips,

which could easily destroy any

chance of retrieving the bones.

It was after just such a storm

that Chris found the front limbs,

the paddles, of our sea dragon.

They convinced him that the

fossil was something special.

You can see why when you

compare them to the paddles

of the kind of ichthyosaur

that's usually found here.

This is an adult and this is

the paddle of this creature

and,

if you compare it to this one...

It's huge. Yeah.

I've never seen anything quite like it.

- There are half a dozen rows of digits there

and how many there?

- I think there's at least 9 or 10, crossways,

and, obviously, you know,

many more in length.

So it's getting on for

twice the number of digits.

And the whole shape of the fin is completely

different. - Quite, quite different.

And must be new, therefore? - I think so.

I've never seen anything quite like it.

How exciting. It's extremely rare

to find a new species of

ichthyosaur, these days.

Only nine have been discovered

here in the last 200 years.

But, can these strange

paddles tell us something

about how this odd

ichthyosaur lived?

To try and find out, we're going to

construct a three-dimensional model.

To do that, we first need

to have the paddles scanned.

To create an image, this cutting-edge

scanner takes thousands of X-ray projections

through the fossil,

in cross sections, as it rotates.

It's not long before

the first images appear.

That's amazing. It's really clear.

You can even see the bones

laying underneath the paddle.

At the moment, we're just

doing one section. - Yeah.

We're going to do more multiple scans down

the specimen and build it all back together

into a three-dimensional volume.

The scans of the paddles are

sent to Bristol University.

Here, scientists can isolate

the image of each bone

within the rock and

then assemble them

to create a detailed,

three-dimensional model.

The team is particularly excited

by the shape and structure

of these paddles,

and I've come to find out why.

We've got a complete paddle here,

taken from the bones itself,

fully reconstructed, rearticulated,

so this is as close as we can get

to what it would've looked like. We

can actually start using this paddle

to try and tell us what

species it might've been.

Because of the size of the paddle and the

way that some of these bones articulate

with each other, it's different

to other Ichthyosaurus

and so,

this could be a new species.

That would be great.

- It would be jolly exciting.

We won't know for sure until

we find the rest of the body.

But can the paddles tell us something

about the way in which this creature swam?

There are a lot of bones in this paddle,

which would've been good for holding steady

and also for allowing it to

be maneuverable in the water.

There would've been cartilage around that,

wouldn't there, somewhere or other? - Yes.

All of the gaps between the bones

would've been filled in with cartilage

and even further around the paddle

itself, giving it a paddle-like shape,

giving it a cross section

a bit like an aero foil,

so that it could cut

straight through the water.

Could they fold them in to the side?

- Probably not.

Looking at the muscles and where they attach,

it suggests these are moving up and down,

helping it to turn very quickly or

keeping it on the straight and narrow

when it wants to be

a little more sedate.

The shape of the paddles

and the way they moved

seems very like the way an animal

alive today uses its paddles.

That animal usually lives in tropical

waters, like these in the Caribbean.

The sea here is warm,

with temperatures much like

they would've been in

Jurassic times around Britain.

And the animal in

question is the dolphin.

Dolphins, of course, are mammals,

not reptiles, like ichthyosaurs.

Nonetheless, the two groups have

bodies shaped in very similar ways.

The front fins, or paddles, of both

would've helped to steady themselves

as they turn and cut

through the water.

And both have similar dorsal fins.

So, although they lived

200 million years apart,

dolphins and ichthyosaurs share

many physical characteristics

and that's because they

evolved in similar ways,

as a response to a

similar environment.

Like dolphins, ichthyosaurs evolved from

ancestors that had once lived on land.

As they became adapted to life in

water, they lost the ability to walk.

Their bodies became more streamlined

and their forelimbs turned into paddles,

to help them swim.

But ichthyosaurs do differ from

dolphins in two striking ways.

Dolphins have tails that

are flattened horizontally

and they drive themselves forward

by beating their tails up and down.

But we know, from their fossils,

that ichthyosaur tails

were flattened vertically,

like those of sharks,

so they must've swum in the same sort of way:

by sweeping their tails from side to side.

Ichthyosaurs, unlike dolphins,

also had back paddles.

They, too, would've helped

stabilize them as they swam.

And what's more, the paddles of our

ichthyosaur are particularly large and long,

rather like those of the

oceanic whitetip shark.

That shape helps the whitetip

to cruise for long distances

with very little expenditure of

energy in their search for food.

So, it could be that our ichthyosaur

was also a long-distance traveler

and only an infrequent visitor

to the Lyme Regis seas.

Which could be why no one has ever

found one of these here before.

Back at the dig site,

the rain has stopped, at last.

The team must try to extract

the rest of the dragon's body

before worse weather arrives.

That's how hard the rock is. It's

actually smashed the end off the chisel.

So you can see what

we're dealing with.

At last, they find signs of

the rest of the skeleton.

Lots and lots of bone in there.

- Yeah. - Ribs and all sorts of stuff.

And there's another,

particularly exciting discovery.

I think it's skin.

- It's a skin?! - Yeah, look. - Really?

They've found signs of fossilized skin.

- Rare isn't it? - Yeah, very rare.

The blocks that contain bones and skin

can't be thrown down like the other rocks.

They must be carefully

strapped up and gently lowered.

So, first block down, few more to go, but

if they go like that, I'll be very pleased.

Two weeks after they started work, I

go down again to check on progress.

Chris shows me what

they've already collected.

So, lots over here, with a bit of a wash.

- Well, I can see something there.

That's more obvious, yes.

- Yeah.

Here, you can see,

glinting in the sunlight,

sections through the backbone,

the vertebrae column.

And these are the ribs that are

still attached to the vertebrae.

And these are the neurals

that come off the backbone.

The spines off the top of the back?

- Yeah. Yeah.

But they've actually got skin preserved

on them. - No, really? - Yeah.

Can you see that here?

- Well, that's the very black.

You can see it on the impression as well.

- This is great news!

But something puzzles me. Would the head

have been on this side or that side?

Most likely here,

in this next slab.

And it's not there?

- Not so far - Boy.

How many more tons to go?

Only a few.

Once the blocks are down on the beach, team

remove as much excess limestone as possible

to make them lighter.

Even then, they're extremely heavy,

so to get them back to Lyme Regis,

they're loaded onto a pontoon

and towed back by boat.

So, for the first time

in 200 million years

our strange ichthyosaur once

again takes to the water.

The dig may be over, but the

investigation is only just beginning.

Now the work becomes more delicate,

involving not sledgehammers,

but small vibrating chisels that chip

off the limestone in tiny flakes.

It's detailed work that will

take months to complete.

Day after day and week after week,

Chris and his team

work patiently to expose

more of the skeleton.

And, as they do so, the bones

reveal something very intriguing.

I've come down to Chris's

workshop to take a look.

It's a bit of a squeeze

past the plesiosaur.

It really is an Aladdin's cave.

After weeks of work, Chris has

exposed the backbones and ribs.

So this is it so far.

- Gosh.

And, in doing so,

he's made a startling discovery.

It looks like it's been attacked.

- Gosh.

There's breakages all through the

rib cage. If you follow one rib,

you go along here, down to here,

then this piece corresponds to this

which then goes over to here, so...

- There, yeah.

One rib is now broken

into three pieces.

How extraordinary.

But what's happened here?

Here the vertebrae column has

been actually pulled away.

I'm fairly positive

it was done in life.

And the paddles, the flippers have been

ripped off. - Where would they go?

But they're in a very odd position,

aren't they?

I mean, they're pointing

in the wrong direction.

They should be, basically, in this

position and facing the other way up,

and they've been ripped

off and turned over.

Gosh. Well, where was the head?

- The head should be here.

That's the very last vertebrae.

- Back of the neck? - Yeah.

So the head's been torn off and

there's no evidence, there's no teeth

or pieces of bone;

it's completely gone.

So it's a murder?

- Yes. - Really?

Yeah, I think it was killed. - Did this

predator crunch the head, do you think?

Who knows, you know?

It's 200 million years ago,

so it's a bit of guess work,

really, isn't it?

So it's a murder story

without a complete body yet?

To find out more, we need to

reveal the rest of the skeleton.

So it's all hands on deck.

They've even roped me in.

This is more difficult

than it looks.

Very good.

Could you start on 3 days a week?

Is it alright? - It's good, yeah.

- I haven't gone too close to the bone?

No, no.

- That's a relief.

But what of the missing head?

If it was been ripped off,

Chris thinks he might

still be able to find it

somewhere on the beach.

So, at every opportunity he scours the

area where the first block was found.

The best time to look is after a storm when

a strong sea has moved sand and shingle

and perhaps revealed

the rocks beneath.

To try and deduce just how

our Ichthyosaur met its fate,

we've sent images of the fossil

to someone who specializes

in investigating the cause of

death in pre-historic animals.

You sent me some photographs, and I

had a look at some of these breaks.

First of all I noticed this here...

if you look you can just see

this bulbous piece on the rib here. This

is where the rib has healed after a break

and the animal's gone

on to live another day.

This animal's had a little

bit of a bad start in life.

Yes. - If you look down here

and especially this one if you look.

This fracture here mirrors

that fracture there

and then we can see a whole line of

fractures where there's no new bone growth.

Something has actually

crushed this rib cage.

So look here at these neural spines

- these are absolutely perfect...

and then from here... they're

broken all the way down to here...

this is the last one that's broken

and then here they're perfect again.

So there to there is damaged,

on the ribs there to there

is damaged and here, too,

and also on some of these belly

ribs. So I think there's a bite

which goes right across here.

That probably reflects

the width of the skull of the animal

that bit it. - Yes. Yep, yeah.

Yeah so it came in across here almost...

- Somewhere like that yeah.

There was a massive bite;

it caused catastrophic injury,

and remember the rib

cage is protecting lungs.

This was an air-breathing marine animal

so once this rib cage is punctured,

and the lungs are punctured,

this animal is dead.

It can't breathe and also it's going to

sink straight down to the seafloor as well.

It's quite likely that the

animal that killed this animal,

presumably it was looking for food,

it didn't get to eat it.

No, I think it just killed it. It didn't

eat it or else it wouldn't be so intact.

So this probably all took

place in the surface water.

But as soon as it had done this

injury, this thing just sank

like a stone straight down to the sea

floor and then it was lost to the animal

that was trying to eat it.

So it looks as if Chris's

attack theory might be right.

But what type of creature

could possibly have inflicted

so much damage to our sea dragon?

A rather unusual fossil in Chris's

collection might give us a clue.

This is fossilized

ichthyosaur droppings

called a coprolite, and what

makes it particularly interesting

is that within this piece of dung,

you can see fish scales.

So that shows that ichthyosaurs were

fish eaters, but more than that...

this one is even more interesting.

Because in this piece of dung

are teeth, ichthyosaur teeth...

so the animal that produced this

was almost certainly a cannibal.

It ate other ichthyosaur species.

Could it be that our dragon was

killed by one of its own kind?

To find out more, I've come to the Natural

History Museum of Stuttgart in Germany.

Here they have one of

the most impressive

and varied collections of

ichthyosaurs in the world.

They came in all shapes and sizes.

But of all the ichthyosaurs that

existed 200 million years ago

there was one which was

particularly fearsome.

This is Temnodontosaurus, one of the biggest

of the sea dragons so far discovered.

They grew up to 10 meters long, and

individual bones have been discovered

which suggest that they could

grow even bigger than that.

The remains of these

terrifying sea monsters

were discovered in a quarry

just outside Stuttgart.

These are the biggest complete

Temnodontosaurus fossils ever found.

This huge predator had the

largest eye known of any animal

which would have given it

extremely acute eyesight.

Not only that,

but the eye was surrounded

by a ring of scutes...

bony plates...

to protect it from the

water pressure at depth.

So,

with eyes the size of footballs,

this monster was able to hunt at

all depths of the Jurassic ocean.

It also had rows of sharp teeth

that would have allowed it

to rip apart almost anything.

These teeth are shaped like blades.

Well-suited for cutting into flesh.

And here's another specimen

of Temnodontosaurus

that is proof positive that

it really was a hunter.

Here is its stomach

and inside its stomach

you can see these tiny,

little circular bones

which are the backbones, the

vertebrae, of a baby ichthyosaur.

So we now know that Temnodontosaurus

could devour young ichthyosaurs,

but would one have been capable of

eating an adult ichthyosaur like ours?

Fossils of Temnodontosaurus have

been found in other regions,

including the Jurassic Coast.

So this monster could

well be our prime suspect.

To build our case further,

we're going to analyze

another specimen of the same species

that was found on the Jurassic Coast.

This is the skull of

a Temnodontosaurus,

and as you can see, it's huge.

This specimen was found by Mary Anning

on the Dorset Coast in the 19th century,

and we are hoping that we may be able

to use it with the latest techniques

to tell us just how powerful

these great jaws could be.

So, for the first time ever,

our team of scientists

are going to attempt to calculate the

bite strength of a Temnodontosaurus.

The first step is

to scan the skull.

These scans will help the team to not only

reconstruct the Temnodontosaurus' skull,

but also work out the

size of its jaw muscles.

They can then assess the power

of this huge predator's bite,

and see if it was strong

enough to kill our ichthyosaur.

Temnodontosaurs are unusual in that they had

huge sharp teeth for cutting through flesh.

But how did other

ichthyosaurs catch their prey?

To get a clue I've come to see

a modern day predator in action.

That is a gharial

crocodile from Indonesia.

Its jaws, as you can see, are not wide

and flat like an African crocodile

but long and thin, and because of that shape

there's very little resistance to the water

so they can snatch fish,

which they do very effectively.

They're very formidable

animals indeed.

Ichthyosaurs must have fed

in much the same way as that.

Their jaws were very similar

to those of the gharial.

Simple studs to grip the prey.

No need to chew it, because the jaws

at the back were quite big enough

to enable the animal to swallow their

prey whole. Just as the gharial does.

So it's likely that our

ichthyosaur had teeth and jaws

specially adapted to catch

small slippery fish and squid

just like a gharial crocodile.

Back in Lyme Regis, the work on the

bones has taken a dramatic turn.

Chris has found that there is fossilized

skin over nearly the whole skeleton.

It seems to be virtually

covering the whole thing.

It's rare to find any sign whatever of

skin on fossils, let alone so much of it.

Fiann Smithwick,

an expert on fossilized skin,

has come to take a sample back to his lab.

- We can look and see

if there's any evidence of the

original pigment preserved in the skin.

It's a lovely piece.

- That's really good, that'll be perfect.

Fiann hopes that this

remarkably preserved sample

might tell us what the skin looked

like and even what color it was.

At the University of Bristol, he places

a tiny sample of the fossilized skin

in a machine that coats its surface

with minute particles of gold.

They will reflect the rays of

a scanning electron microscope.

It's astonishing that you can actually see

the remains of skin on such an ancient fossil.

But this microscope can also magnify its

structure tens of thousands of times.

Here we have exceptional level of

preservation of the skin of our ichthyosaur,

despite being 200 million years old. So the

structures we're looking at here are around

half a micrometer across. And a micro

meter is one millionth of a meter,

and you see here these little granules

and these are preserved melanosomes.

Now, melanosomes contain the pigment

that you have in mammal hair,

in bird feathers and reptile skin,

and the abundance of them

and the distribution of them can tell us about

the overall color patterns of the animal.

So having a high abundance

means you're likely to be darker

and having a low abundance means

you're likely to be lighter.

This area has come from the back. There's

a large abundance of these melanosomes,

there's a lot of pigment here

and when we look at samples

that have come from the bottom of

the animal we don't see this pigment

in this level of abundance. So it

most likely had a much darker back

than it did a belly and this

conforms to a type of color pattern

known as countershading

in modern animals.

You can see countershading in lots of sea

animals today, great white sharks for example.

Both predators and prey

are colored in this way.

It makes it more difficult to

see both from above and below.

So this is the first time that

we've actually seen evidence

of a counter-shaded

pattern in an ichthyosaur.

So that really is a step forward

in our knowledge of these creatures?

- It is, and it can tell us a huge amount

about the way the animal might have lived.

- Just by looking at that picture.

Just from looking at these melanosomes.

- Great.

Today, counter-shaded animals tend to live

in open water where there's good visibility.

Ichthyosaurs also lived in the open

seas, so being camouflaged in this way

would have been very

valuable to them.

The latest scientific research

suggests that counter-shading

might also protect

against ultra violet light

and even help to regulate

body temperature.

As an air-breathing creature, our

ichthyosaur would have had to spend much time

near the surface, so counter-shading could

have been a benefit for that reason as well.

There are,

of course many marine reptiles

still living in the oceans today.

Like turtles.

The biggest of them

is the leatherback,

whose ancestors in fact were around

at the same time as the ichthyosaurs.

Today they come ashore to nest in

many places, including the Caribbean.

This huge leatherback

turtle is laying her eggs.

She's hauled her way up from

the sea, and dug a hole,

and now she's depositing

about 100 of them.

She'll then fill in the hole and then

work her way down, back to the sea.

It's clearly a very

laborious process.

And that's the challenge facing all

reptiles that live in the sea...

having to come onto

land to lay eggs.

Ichthyosaurs were reptiles

and they lived in the sea,

but they were so well

adapted to a life at sea

that they gave birth to live young.

And that would have saved the sea dragons

making the dangerous journey onto land.

There is remarkable evidence

that ichthyosaurs gave birth

to live young in the

Stuttgart museum.

And here is a truly extraordinary,

beautiful, almost poignant fossil.

Proof positive that ichthyosaurs

gave birth to live young.

Here is the baby just at the moment

as it's leaving the birth canal.

It comes out tail first and

as soon as it was freed,

it would have risen to the

surface to take its first breath,

but something happened before

that did and here is the proof.

Whatever it was,

death must have been instant.

So ichthyosaurs gave birth to live

babies just as many sharks do today.

After several weeks of research,

the team at Bristol University

have managed to reconstruct the

skull of the Temnodontosaurus

so that they can analyze

the power of its jaws.

How do you assess the strength

of this animal's bite?

Well the first thing that we need to know

is the volume of muscle that could fit

into the back of the skull. So the muscles

are attaching round here and there are also,

there's a group of muscles that

are attaching further forward here,

and if we know how much muscle

volume there is we can estimate

how much force that muscle can generate.

- And what did you discover?

We found out that our upper

estimate of bite force

was around 30,000 Newtons, and to

put that in a modern day context,

that's twice as powerful as the largest

saltwater crocodile that's been measured.

Twice as powerful?

- Yes. - So that's enormous. Yeah.

Yes,

it's a very powerful bite force.

So, this must have been the animal

with the most powerful

bite of its time, must it?

Yes. That's absolutely right...

Of its time, it would have been.

Not only did it have a powerful bite,

its jaw-closing muscles also attach

quite close to the jaw joint.

Now normally in animals

where that happens they have quite

a fast, but less forceful bite,

but the fact that this animal is actually

so big means that it has a fast bite,

but also by virtue of its sheer size

it also has a powerful bite too.

So it basically has the

best of both worlds.

So this was the king of the Jurassic sea?

- Or queen... - Sorry.

Yeah.

So it seems very likely that

temnodontosaurus was strong enough

not only to kill our sea dragon,

but to rip its head clean off.

It must have been a

terrifying battle.

Our investigations have given us a pretty

good idea of how our sea dragon died.

But can the reconstruction

work carried out

at Bristol University tell

us more about its life?

All the blocks containing the

fossil have now been scanned.

With those scans,

the team were able to separate

the individual bones and

then put them back together

to create a 3D image of the ichthyosaur's

body before it was attacked.

They've added a head based on

estimates of other ichthyosaur species.

That's magnificent.

- This is the whole animal,

and we estimate that it may have been

up to round about 41/2 meters long.

Is that bigger than most in their line?

- Yes, this is certainly bigger

than most of the ichthyosaurs

that we see at Lyme Regis.

Looks huge; looks amazing.

- Here are the forelimbs, right at the front,

and we've got hindlimbs here and,

at the back, we've got a tail bend.

This is supported by the backbone, which

extends along the whole length of the body.

But that bend is natural, isn't it?

- Yes. - That's not a break.

That gives strength to the

lower element of the tail

for driving it forward.

- Yes. Much like a shark.

The tail bend is the main

propulsive organ of the animal.

So could this be a new species? - Yes.

These pieces of evidence together suggest

that it is going to be a new

species and it's jolly exciting.

They don't come along every day.

- Historic. - Yes.

This is wonderful news: a sighting

by Chris on the beach in Lyme Regis

has led to the discovery of

a new species of ichthyosaur,

adding to our knowledge of

these fascinating creatures.

It's extraordinary how much you can

discover from one single fossil.

Digital reconstruction has

allowed us to rebuild this animal

to reveal how it looked

and how it moved.

We've discovered for the first time

that this creature was counter-shaded,

but that didn't stop

it from being attacked.

By analyzing its bones

we've been able to work out

that its most likely attacker

was the Temnodontosaurs,

the most ferocious predator

of the seas at that time.

It's been a fascinating

journey of discovery.

But for me the real wonder

is the bones themselves...

I can't wait to see what they look

like when they're finally cleaned.

After many months of painstaking

and patient preparation,

Chris and his team have

finally completed their work

on the fossil of our

ancient sea dragon.

Here it is finished.

It's really beautiful, isn't it? I

mean, it is beautiful, that's for sure.

Thank you. It's a great specimen isn't it?

- Lovely.

And how many new species have been

discovered in the last 100 years?

Very few, very, very few, and it's

thrilling to find something that's...

that's, you know,

just never been seen before.

Well, it's a long time spent just

revealing the body of this creature,

but it's also revealed this extraordinary

story of life and death, predator, prey,

fighting it out in the

seas 200 million years ago

just down there in the bottom of the lane.

- Yeah. It's a fantastic story.

Exciting. Really,

really thrilling and romantic.

For Chris,

this has been a labor of love,

and it's filled in another gap

in the paleontological jigsaw,

a story that all started with an

odd-looking boulder on a Dorset beach.

It's extraordinary to think

that some 200 million years ago,

exactly here,

the greatest predator of its time

was swimming around in the sea.

And that's what I really love

about fossils and fossil hunting.

It gives you an

extraordinarily vivid insight

into what the world was

like millions of years

before human beings even

appeared on this planet.

Ichthyosaurs died out

around 90 million years ago.

No one knows why,

but standing here,

and having excavated that spectacular

fossil it's not difficult to imagine a time

when dragons really

did rule the seas.