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Scientific American

March 1, 2004

1 min read

Rulers of the Jurassic Seas

Fish-shaped reptiles called ichthyosaurs reigned over the oceans for as long as dinosaurs roamed the land, but only recently have paleontologists discovered why these creatures were so successful

By Ryosuke Motani

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RYOSUKE MOTANI, who was born in Tokuyama, Japan, is a researcher in the department of paleobiology at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. As a child he found ichthyosaurs uninteresting. (¿They looked too ordinary in my picture books,¿ he recalls.) But his view changed during his undergraduate years at the University of Tokyo, after a paleontology professor allowed him to study the only domestic reptilian fossil they had: an ichthyosaur. ¿I quickly fell in love with these noble beasts,¿ he says. Motani went on to explore ichthyosaur evolution for his doctoral degree from the University of Toronto in 1997. A fellowship from the Miller Institute then took him to the University of California, Berkeley, for postdoctoral research. He moved back to Canada in September 1999.

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SA Special Editions Vol 14 Issue 2sThis article was originally published with the title “Rulers of the Jurassic Seas” in SA Special Editions Vol. 14 No. 2s (), p. 4
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0304-4sp
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