The doctoral candidate at the University of Fribourg Gaël Spicher has described a new species of ichthyosaur, a marine reptile that lived nearly 180 million years ago. The study has been published in the journal Fossil Record.

It is Gaël Spicher’s Master’s thesis that will no doubt leave its stamp on his career. Now a doctoral candidate at the University of Fribourg and JURASSICA Museum in Porrentruy, the young paleontologist recently published the description a new species of ichthyosaur. The fossils that enabled him to make this discovery are part of a collection conserved at the Urwelt-Museum Oberfranken in Bayreuth. Called Eurhinosaurus mistelgauensis, these specimens come from the so-called Mistelgau clay pit in Bavaria, a very important though still understudied fossil site. The specimens were excavated between 2002 and 2014.

Very well preserved specimens
Ichthyosauria is an order of extinct marine reptiles that looked like modern-day dolphins. The specimens that Mr. Spicher studied, including two nearly complete skeletons and a partial snout, lived around 180 million years ago during the Early Jurassic, when dinosaurs were the dominant land vertebrates. At the time, Europe was a collection of subtropical islands separated by shallow warm seas, home to a very rich marine fauna that included ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, ammonites, and belemnites, along with a variety of fish and invertebrates.

Cyrano of the Jurassic
The specimens studied are exceptionally well preserved with respect to known contemporary specimens, which in most instances are severely flattened. E. mistelgauensis displays a particularly striking feature, an extremely elongated upper jaw (over 60 cm) that far exceeded the lower mandible, lending the animal a pronounced overbite like the swordfish that cruise modern oceans. Some eurhinosaurs grew to up to 7 m in length. For paleontologists, however, what differentiates this new species is its especially thick ribs, along with several distinctive features in the way the skull attaches to the neck. It is these differences that led Mr. Spicher to identify E. mistelgauensis as a new species.

A PhD in progress
After completing this study, which was based on his Master’s thesis at the University of Bonn, Mr. Spicher began his PhD at the University of Fribourg last year. While the doctoral candidate has traded in his ichthyosaurs for the first marine turtles, Mr. Spicher has no intention of spurning his first love and intends to tease out the ecological implications of the thickened ribs in E. mistelgauensis as well as the species’ bone pathologies. They could well reveal new details about the life and death of these remarkable animals.

Spicher, G. E., Miedema, F., Heijne, J., & Klein, N. (2025). A new Eurhinosaurus (Ichthyosauria) species from the Lower Jurassic (Toarcian) of Mistelgau (Bavaria, Southern Germany). Fossil Record, 28(2), 249–291. https://doi.org/10.3897/fr.28.e154203

Artist’s rendering by Andrey Atuchin, with permission of the Urwelt-Museum Oberfranken.