Tired scholar's discovery has a Field day

CHICAGO - Research and planning are often key factors scientists cite when they make a great discovery. Only rarely does being out of shape play a role.

But Field Museum scientist Jim Holstein said being dog-tired after a long day of trekking through a Nevada mountain range led to his find of a new type of prehistoric marine reptile that on Monday was laid out, in fossil form, on a table in the Chicago museum.

The 28-foot-long animal is now known as Thalattoarchon saurophagis, "lizard-eating ruler of the seas," a member of the very successful ichthyosaur family that lived, for the most part concurrently with dinosaurs, for 160 million years.

It died roughly 244 million years ago and is the earliest type of ichthyosaur -- and only the second on record -- to show signs of being a "superpredator" that ate animals of its own size atop the marine food chain in a manner similar to a killer whale, said Nadia Frobisch, lead author of a paper on the new species in the recent electronic issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Before getting its new scientific name, it was known simply as "Jim," after Holstein, who credits his discovery to being the most exhausted of the original search party 14 1/2 years ago.

He was in central Nevada's Augusta Mountains, returning to camp along a high ridge after a day of searching for fossils in an ancient seabed turned mountainside.

Trailing his colleagues, Martin Sander and Olivier Rieppel, he saw the skull of the ichthyosaur that, upon closer examination, turned out to have a distinctive feature.

But most dined only on smaller marine life. The teeth of the specimen Holstein found were large and had two cutting surfaces, suggesting it might have killed and eaten other large animals.

"Jim" was entered into Sander's field notes for the expedition on July 24, 1998, and essentially forgotten for seven years, when it caught the attention of some of Sanders' students at the University of Bonn in Germany.

"Lars [Schmitz] and I stumbled over the notes that Martin had taken on that last field day ... which said 'large ichthyosaur discovered with cutting edges on the teeth,'" Frobisch, who now works at a museum in Berlin, recalled via e-mail.

"This immediately gripped our attention, as there is only one very poorly preserved ichthyosaur known from the Himalaya region to have cutting edges on the teeth."

Sander recalled Schmitz, Frobisch and another student "storming into my office one day and demanding to go" and see this animal.

It looks a little rough now. Holstein described the head, flattened and condensed by fossilization, as looking "like a killer pancake right now." But it is a killer pancake with scientific significance.

"Our 'Jim' was the first in a long row of 'T. rexes' of the sea," Sander said. "At the level of the ecosystem, the discovery is important because the presence of a top predator indicates that [roughly] 242 million years ago, 8 million years after the catastrophe [when life on Earth nearly ended at the end of the Permian period, 250 million years ago], the modern ecosystems had evolved in the sea. Nothing fundamentally happened since then. The food web remained the same, only the players changed.