Curator at Kronosaurus Korner museum at Richmond says the well-preserved fossil of a baby Ichthyosaur, being excavated and prepared this week, is “absolutely amazing”.

Paul Stumkat says the fossil, discovered last year, is a rare find, “what we’ve got here is probably the most complete baby Ichthyosaur ever found in Australia. This thing is absolutely amazing. It is not in utero, it probably would have been an infant. What is really fantastic, is this thing is almost 99 per cent intact.”

“There’s so much material that’s never been found, so we’ve never had a really good understanding of what’s happening with Ichthyosaurs, because quite often they’ve all broken up, eaten by other animals, and disintegrated when they’ve been preserved. So for a paleontologist to find any complete creature, especially a vertebrate creature, that is really special.”

“Ichthyosaur means ‘fish lizard’. It’s an amazing marine reptile from the early Cretaceous around the Richmond area.”

“What we’re beginning to understand about the inland ocean is the bottom of the ocean was anoxic, there was no oxygen down there in certain areas, and that’s why the animals stay complete, no predators lived down in that layer of the ocean, and that’s why we think we’ve got nice complete specimens in this particular layer.”

“It’s incredibly rare to find an intact articulated specimen, and that’s what’s so wonderful about this. It’s all laid out, basically, as it died.”

Paul Stumkat says the sounds of power tools echo through the dig site this week, “we’ve got these amazing little micro-jackhammer tools that we’re busily trying to discover where all the parts of the body are so when I cut it out I don’t accidently cut through anything important. They chip away at the surface of the limestone block. Pretty soon I’ll be getting my big circular saw out, and doing a number of cuts around the perimeter of the specimen, and then take it back to the museum.”

The remains of another Ichthyosaur lies close by, and Paul Stumkat says plans for a dig are set for next year, “I don’t know if that’s mum or dad over there, who knows!”

The Kronosaurus Korner museum expects the Ichthyosaur to be on public display in Richmond soon.