Dean Lomax

And in fact, you've brought a piece of it with you today.

I have indeed, yeah.

Let me carefully unwrap this.

So this is a dorsal vertebra, and it's one of the largest.

So this is about 12, 13 centimetres wide.

And this is one of the real specimens.

Jim, I'll pass that to you.

it's very heavy i mean it weighs probably about a kilo or so something something yeah yeah about that yeah that's a good indicator as well because when we excavated the skeleton the the skull block alone weighed over a ton like it was super heavy to get out of the ground and you imagine so this is one of the largest of the ichthyosaurs vertebrae but they had upwards of 150 plus vertebrae some of them the size of pennies but this is definitely the largest this is bigger than the palm of my hand and it's just one of the vertebrae yeah i better pass it back to you very carefully thank thank you

It always varies from site to site.

The key thing is you're always looking for certain patterns, certain structures.

And if you go to any fossil site, it's always important to go armed with a bit of an idea of what you might expect to find.

So if you look through a book or you look online at images of stuff like that, that gets your eyes into it.

Yeah, this is a spectacular fossil that the private collector brought to my attention and discovered.

So it's a giant flipper of an ichthyosaur where basically there's all these finger bones that you can see.

And then for about 30, 40 percent of the rest of this flipper is all just soft tissues.

And it's almost like a wing of a plane or if you think like a wing of an owl.

And preserved in there were all these like really strange banding structures.

And then we had these things that looked a little bit like spikes along the trailing edge, but they're not spikes.

There were these really unusual structures that we term chondroderms.

And collectively, all these different features reveal that this ichthyosaur had developed silent swimming, like stealth.