How does your plesiosaur swim? — The Fossil Files

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For our first paper, we look at some exceptional preservation of soft tissue in Jurassic plesiosaur (large marine reptiles). Detailed preservation of soft tissues to the sub-cellular level is very rare in the fossil record. We discuss this specific example from Germany (which we name Nigel) and the types of analyses that the authors did of its skin and tissues. This new data helps us reconstruct how plesiosaurs may have lived and moved. Or does it?

In this figure from the paper we can see the whole fossil of Nigel (A), a close up of the preserved skin (B and C), and a cross section of the sub-cellular detail from the fossil skin (D and E) compared with skin cells from a modern turtle (F).

The paper is "Skin, scales, and cells in a Jurassic plesiosaur" published in Current Biology in 2025 by Miguel Marx of Lund Univertsity Sweden, and colleages.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.01.001

Widescreen artwork: Joshua Knüppe