After studying a spectacularly preserved metre-long skull fossil, a team of international researchers from Canada, Colombia and Germany discovered an extinct marine reptile.

The fossil, which was studied for one of the last echocardiograms, is one of the ancient large marine reptiles with a frightening shape such as swordfish, and lived in Colombia 130 million years ago.

The director of the Redpath Museum at McGill University, Hans Larson, states, "This most extensive development of unique teeth has allowed him to eat large prey, although other echinoderms have small teeth of equal size that only allow them to feed on small prey."

He adds: "The new species we discovered modified their tooth sizes and distances to build an arsenal of teeth through which they could crush large prey, such as large fish and other marine reptiles."

Scientists decided to call the new echosaur "Kyhytysuka," which translates to "person who cuts with something sharp" according to the original language in central Colombia; Where the excavator was found; In honor of the ancient Muisca civilization that has existed in this region for thousands of years.

Researchers believe that the large picture of the evolution of echosaurs has begun to become apparent with the discovery of this new species.

Erin Maxwell, of the State Natural History Museum in Stuttgart, says: "We compared this most common to those of Jurassic and other Cretaceous times and were able to identify a new type of Cretaceous."

She adds: "This discovery is shaking the evolutionary tree of achthyosaurs and opening the door for us to test new theories of how they evolved."

It was previously known to scientists that echosaurs were particularly abundant in the early Triassic and Jurassic periods, until they were replaced as the largest aquatic predators by another group of marine reptiles, pelosaurs, in the later Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Scientists thought that the achthyosaurs became extinct in the late Cretaceous for unknown reasons, but the new study says that the achthyosaurs accompanied the bilosaurs in their time of existence, which would result in a new branch of achthyosaurs in the evolutionary tree.