A graveyard of skeletons belonging to an extinct, reptile-like fish was discovered underneath a melting glacier in Chile, Live Science reported.
The almost complete skeletons belonged to four different species of ichthyosaurs, a large, prehistoric marine reptile that lived with the dinosaurs 245 million to 90 million years ago, or during the Mesozoic Era. Ichthyosaurs is a Greek name that means "fish lizard."
Scientists found skeletons of adult and embryo ichthyosaurs, 46 in total, in the rock near the melting Tyndall Glacier in Chile's Torres del Paine National Park.
The "fish lizards" were fast swimmers, with vertical flippers attached to their tube-shaped bodies and a long snout.
"They look a lot like dolphins today," lead paleontologist Wolfgang Stinnesbeck, from the University of Heidelberg in Germany, told Live Science.
Stinnesbeck and his colleagues had to hike for nearly 14 hours to reach the glacier, but not before a grueling five hour drive.
But once they arrived at the site they found one of the most well preserved examples of Early Cretaceous marine reptiles in the world, Live Science reported. Skeletons of prehistoric reptiles are rarely found in South America, and the ones that are found are usually incomplete.
Their findings were recently published in the May 22 edition of the journal Geological Society of America Bulletin.
The ichthyosaurs were most likely killed by mudslides that often fell into the underwater canyons where they liked to catch squid-like animals to eat, researchers told Live Science. Their bodies ended up at the bottom of the sea where they became trapped in the water's sediment.
Scientists can't officially say what wiped out the fish lizards as a species. They most likely became extinct before the dinosaurs, Stinnesbeck told Live Science. One theory is that volcanic activity decreased oxygen levels in oceans all over the world, thus affecting the marine reptiles.
