The evidence comes thanks to researchers from the University of California, Davis, who have found the remains of an amphibious ichthyosaur in China's Anhui Province.
Ichthyosaurs were marine reptiles from the dinosaur age some 250 million years ago. Before this find, there was no fossil evidence of the time when they were moving toward life at sea.
"But now we have this fossil showing the transition," said the paper's lead author, Ryosuke Motani, a professor in the U.C. Davis department of earth and planetary sciences, in a press release. "There's nothing that prevents it from coming onto land."
The fossil has been dated to 248 million years ago, during the Triassic period (250 to 200 million years ago) and is about 1.5 feet long.
The new ichthyosaur fossil has marked differences from the ichthyosaurs science has already cataloged, the latter having adapted completely to living at sea. The new find had uncommonly large flippers that were flexible enough to allow the creature to move as though it were at sea while on land. Its wrists, meanwhile, were also flexible enough to enable crawling on land.
The amphibious ichthyosaur also had a short nose that was consistent with that of land reptiles and in contrast with the long, beak-like snouts of sea-dwellking ichthyosaurs.
Read more at Discovery News
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