The fossil, known as the Storr Loch monster, has been kept in museum storage since its discovery on the Isle of Skye in 1966.
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“Ichthyosaurs like the Storr Lochs Monster ruled the waves while dinosaurs thundered across the land”, Brusatte said in a news release.
“I think this is one of the most important fossils which has ever been found in Scotland”, Steve says. “When he discovered this, he realized it was a much bigger thing”.
“What we have had before is a few bones here and there, but what we have now is nearly a complete skeleton so it is one of a kind”.
“SSE hopes this fossil will indeed prove to be a “crown jewel” in Scotland’s Jurassic history and thanks to the foresight of the Gillies family, enjoyed by generations to come”.
According to Dr Neil Clark, of the Hunterian Museum at the University of Glasgow, the Misty Isle’s fossils include “very rare” dinosaur remains from the Middle Jurassic, a period of Earth’s history still a mystery to scientists because of a shortage of fossil evidence from the time.
The fossil, dubbed the Storr Lochs Monster, is a almost intact skeleton of an ichthyosaur, a family of extinct marine reptiles that lived alongside the dinosaurs.
“It looks like that, though, because we don’t have that many fossils from that time period anywhere in the world”.
In 2011, tonnes of rock were disturbed at a Jurassic site in what has been described as one of Scotland’s most reckless acts of fossil collecting.
Dr Brusatte says these reptiles, from the ichthyosaurs group, were “close cousins to dinosaurs” and would have lived in the water all the time, even giving birth in the ocean.
First discovered in 1966, the fossil has at last been freed from its prehistoric sarcophagus to reveal a chunky, four-metre-long (13 feet) deep-sea killer-its pointed mouth bristling with hundreds of cone-shaped teeth.
“People don’t realise that REAL sea monsters used to exist”, he said by email.
A few years later, Allan Gillies read about Brusatte’s research and contacted the scientist about the big fossil found near the hydropower station.
Skye is one of the few places in the world where fossils from the middle Jurassic period can be found and it has been referred to as “Scotland’s dinosaur island”. The fossil was encased in a rock when Norrie Gillies, an amateur fossil collector, first spotted some bones embedded in a rock near Storr Lochs power station in 1960s. For Allan Gillies, who was six years old when his father found the ichthyosaur, the fossil carries scientific-and personal-significance.
“There weren’t really any paleontologists in Scotland who studied fossil reptiles”, Brusatte told me.
“He was always interested in the environment ’round about him”, says Allan Gillies, Norrie Gillies’s son and an electrical engineer with SSE. “This isn’t the sort of thing you find in your back garden”.
Once analysis of the fossil is complete, it will go on display at a number of locations, including SSE’s new visitor centre at the Pitlochry dam.
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It is hoped this will help to reveal how ichthyosaurs evolved during the middle Jurassic period, an era always been shrouded in mystery owing to a lack of fossil evidence from the time. The extinct predator’s remains were then tucked away in the backrooms of the then Royal Scottish Museum (now National Museums Scotland) for 50 years.
