Fossil CSI: Cracking The Case Of An Ancient Reptile Graveyard

Short Wave

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🗓️ 23 January 2023

⏱️ 13 minutes

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Summary

This mystery begins in 1952, in the Nevada desert, when a self-taught geologist came across the skeleton of a massive creature that looked like a cross between a whale and a crocodile. It turned out to be just the beginning.

Ichthyosaurs were bus-sized marine reptiles that lived during the age of dinosaurs, when this area of Nevada was underwater. Yet paleontologists found few other animals here, which raised the questions: Why were there so many adult ichthyosaurs, and almost nothing else? What could have killed them all?

Paleontologist Neil Kelley says that recently, there has been a major break in the case—some new evidence, and a hypothesis that finally seems to fit. Neil talked with Short Wave co-host Aaron Scott about his theory of the case, and why it matters to our understanding of the past.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
0:06.3	Today, a mystery.
0:08.3	It begins in 1952.
0:10.5	A self-taught geologist by the name of Margaret Wheat was giving an old quarry in the middle
0:15.2	of the Nevada desert a sweep, you know, like geologists do, when she uncovered an ancient
0:21.3	skeleton and what would turn out to be an enormous craver.
0:26.3	Neil Kelly has seen it firsthand.
0:28.4	It is incredible how many Ictiosaur fossils are present at this site.
0:34.4	They're just tumbling out of the hills, basically.
0:36.8	Neil is a paleontologist at Vanderbilt University and he says Ictiosaurs were marine reptiles
0:42.3	that lived during the age of dinosaurs.
0:44.9	Basically, picture a giant dolphin with four flippers.
0:48.9	I mean, they really are whale-sized animals that are gray whales or sperm whales.
0:54.4	At the time in the 50s, Ictiosaur fossils have been found in a few places around the
0:58.4	world and so it wasn't such a surprise to find them in Nevada.
1:02.2	It might be a desert now, but in the late Triassic, it was a shallow seaway.
1:06.5	So when we reached out to some paleontologists that you see Berkeley and said I found these
1:10.9	giant Ictiosaur fossils in Nevada, they said that's cool.
1:16.4	We already have a lot of those, so we're not that interested in it.
1:21.2	She didn't give up and convinced the paleontologist Charles Camp to visit this reptile graveyard
1:26.2	out in the middle of nowhere.
1:28.8	And quickly they realized that this was not just the same thing that they already had.
	...

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