Attenborough and the Sea Dragon Page #3

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A rainbow will be little

comfort if the storm persists.

Rough seas and heavy downpours

can cause landslips,

which could easily destroy any

chance of retrieving the bones.

It was after just such a storm

that Chris found the front limbs,

the paddles of our sea dragon.

They convinced him that the

fossil was something special.

VOICEOVER:
You can see why

when you compare them

VOICEOVER:
to the paddles

of the kind of ichthyosaur

VOICEOVER:
that's usually found here.

This is an adult and this is

the paddle of this creature

and if you compare it to this one...

- Oh, it's huge. Oh, yeah.

- I've never seen anything quite like it.

There are half a dozen rows of

digits there and how many there?

I think there's at least

nine or ten crossways

and obviously, you know,

many more in length.

It's getting on for twice

the number of digits.

- And the whole shape of the fin is completely...

- Quite different.

And must be new, therefore?

- I think so. I've never seen anything quite like it.

- How exciting!

VOICEOVER:
It's extremely rare to find

VOICEOVER:
a new species

of ichthyosaur these days.

Only nine have been discovered

here in the last 200 years.

But can these strange

paddles tell us something

about how this odd ichthyosaur lived?

To try and find out, we are going to

construct a three-dimensional model.

To do that, we first need to

have the paddles scanned.

So, Chris is taking them

to Southampton University.

Here, the engineering department

has one of the largest

high resolution scanners in the country.

It's not every day someone walks in

with a 200-million-year-old sea reptile.

The machine can scan objects of

all different shapes and sizes

from ancient coins to the

components of spacecraft.

To create a picture, the scanner

takes thousands of X-ray images

in cross sections through

the fossil as it rotates.

It's not long before the

first images appear.

That's amazing. It looks really clear.

You can even see the bones

laying underneath the paddle.

At the moment, we're

just doing one section.

We're going to do multiple

scans down the specimen

and build it all back together

into a three-dimensional volume.

The scans of the paddles are

sent to Bristol University.

Here, scientists can isolate the

image of each bone within the rock

and then assemble them to create a

detailed three-dimensional model.

The team is particularly

excited by the shape

and structure of these paddles

and I've come to find out why.

We've got a complete paddle here

taken from the bones itself,

fully reconstructed, rearticulated

so this is as close as we can get

to what it would have looked like.

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