A less than ordinary morphological stasis

“These stases are rare”, continues Valentin Fischer. “They can often be explained by the fact that an animal finds a refuge zone which changes little during geological periods like a shallow sea that is not affected by great ocean changes. This would typically be a stable zone, without any major new conditions that might force a species to evolve”. But in the case of Malawania, it is difficult to establish a theory that might explain such a long stasis. Malawania is an oceanic species, the ichthyosaurs that are its contemporaries evolved greatly. “Yet at the same time, it is the only known representative of the species and it is not perfectly preserved, so we cannot make firm deductions about its habits or its biotope. Malawania was found in the Middle-East; we do not yet know if that means that its line was confined to this region or not, although that is unlikely for such a long period, lasting several tens of millions of years”.

From a general point of view, although the fossil record of the ichthyosaurs is not so bad in the northern and southern latitudes of our planet, very few specimens have been found in the tropical zones of that time (Middle-East, Africa…). There is therefore a need for a considerable amount of exploration work to be carried out in this region which the discovery of Malawania could initiate, and new discoveries in these regions could provide a better understanding the evolution of this very new group represented by the timeless swimmer. “One thing is certain, the discovery of such a lineage implies that there is an enormous amount of information that we don’t yet know. We need to find a large number of representatives of sub-groups and different eras which are the missing links required to complete this new chain”.

A false start

This encounter with Malawania was somewhat incongruous. Its “young age” seemed so improbable that nearly 60 years passed before it was given the attention that it really deserved. In 1952, a group of British petroleum geologists stopped to chat on a mule-path in Kurdistan, in Northern Iraq. When one of them happened to look down, he noticed some ribs and other fragments of bone at his feet. Subsequently it was decided to bring the fossil back to the London museum, on the supposition that the slab came from the nearby rocks which contained sediments dating back as far as the Jurassic.

An English expert, Robert Appleby, decided to study the specimen. Given its morphology and the location in which it was found, there could be no doubt that the animal evolved during the Jurassic. Appleby decided to write a paper to record this discovery that did not seem too important at the time. However, his paper was rejected due to imprecisions in the methods for dating the rock. The morphology of the animal and the location of the fossil were not sufficient proof. There was always the possibility that it had been brought there from another site. During the 1970s, an expert from Cambridge took a sample and after dissolving the rock in acid, he studied the remaining microfossils and pollen. The conclusion was certain, the fossil dated from the Cretaceous. However, Appleby then thought that the wrong sample had been delivered. He rewrote an article in which the ichthyosaur was still considered to be from the Jurassic period. The paper was rejected again. The researcher ceased working on the bone samples at the end of the 1970s.

It was only in 2003, after the death of Appleby, that his widow contacted two English researchers known to Valentin Fischer, to ask them if they could take up her husband’s unfinished research and publish it. The young Belgian researcher then became involved, and took an interest in this timeless fossil. After a series of statistically reliable tests, there was no longer any room for doubt. Malawania had indeed lived during the lower Cretaceous, between the Hauterivian and the Barremian and was a representative example of a primitive group of ichthyosaurs.