Deep within a limestone cave in western Cuba, paleontologists have discovered probably the most entire ichthyosaur skeleton but discovered at the island.

The ichthyosaur skeleton was once found out in 2023 in a fluvial cave in El Cuajaní, inside the Viñales Geopark and Nationwide Park in western Cuba.

The uncovered section of the skeleton contains the U-shaped curved vertebral column with related ribs, remoted vertebrae, and a unmarried hindlimb.

“The specimen is preserved in the rock slab that paperwork the ceiling of the fluvial cave now referred to as Cueva del Ictiosaurio, at roughly 60 m from its front,” mentioned Dr. Manuel Iturralde-Vinent from the Academia de Ciencias de Cuba and his colleagues from Cuba, Argentina, Poland and the USA.

The fossil dates again more or less 145 million years in the past to the Tithonian age of the Overdue Jurassic epoch.

Till now, Cuba’s ichthyosaur report was once in large part confined to older, Oxfordian deposits.

“This fossil represents probably the most entire ichthyosaur recovered from Cuba to this point,” the paleontologists mentioned.

“It extends the temporal report of ichthyosaurs at the island, which prior to now simplest integrated specimens from the Oxfordian.”

Although the El Cuajaní ichthyosaur, because the researchers informally name it, can’t but be assigned to a selected species, its anatomy suggests affinities with a circle of relatives of ichthyosaurs known as Ophthalmosauridae.

“Its hindlimb morphology is analogous to that of Tithonian platypterygiine ophthalmosaurids, similar to Caypullisaurus bonapartei and Aegirosaurus leptospondylus,” they defined.

In line with the scientists, the animal lived in a deep, open-marine inside the early Caribbean seaway, a key marine hall connecting far away portions of the Jurassic global.

“The Caribbean seaway turned into a very powerful marine hall for the reason that mid Oxfordian, connecting the Jap and Western Tethys, taking part in a pivotal position in the marine faunal dispersal for the reason that Overdue Jurassic between Europe, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific,” they mentioned.

“This hall had a modern Triassic-Early Jurassic ancestry represented by means of intercontinental rift valleys which must now not be regarded as a part of the early Caribbean basin or the Gulf of Mexico consistent with se, however have been precursors positioned in west-central Pangea.”

“The El Cuajaní ichthyosaur provides to the rising frame of Tithonian ichthyosaur lately found out in the area and may give a contribution to a greater working out of the biogeographic historical past of the gang,” they concluded.

Their paper was once printed on February 6 in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

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Manuel Iturralde-Vinent et al. A partial ichthyosaur (?Ophthalmosauridae) skeleton from the Tithonian (Higher Jurassic) of western Cuba. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, printed on-line February 6, 2026; doi: 10.1080/02724634.2025.2609717