Marine reptile that once had four nostrils

Millions of years before dolphins were around, dolphin-like marine reptiles roamed the oceans. They were called ichthyosaurs.

A new species has now been uncovered in the Paja Formation in Colombia's eastern Andes.
The 130-million-year-old creature had a very strange nose, unlike that of any reptile alive today.
Each nostril was split into two separate openings, a feature that distinguished it from all other known ichthyosaurs. It has been named Muiscasaurus catheti.
It is hard to reconstruct exactly how it looked, says Erin Maxwell of the Natural History Museum in Stuttgart, Germany, who analysed the fossil.

The ichthyosaur lived in the Early Cretaceous (Credit: Erin Maxwell)
Like others in its group, M. catheti had large eyes, slender jaws and small teeth. It ate small fish.
The fossil is of an infant only about 3m long. Adults may have reached 5m.
"I could tell it was a juvenile based on the size of its eyes relative to the rest of the skull," says Maxwell. "In reptiles, babies have very big eyes and heads compared to their body."
What's more, the creature's bones were porous, indicating it was still growing. Only its skull was discovered, so it is unclear how the rest of its body might have looked.