Dino card No. 0499 of 2,027

Dearcmhara

Say it: JARK-var-a

Name means: “marine lizard”1

Ate: MeatIchthyosaursEarly Jurassic to Middle JurassicNot technically a dinosaur

Dearcmhara was a marine reptile that lived in the warm seas around Scotland during the Jurassic Period. It looked a bit like a dolphin with a long snout and flippers, and it was a fast swimmer that hunted fish and squid.2 1

Fun fact: this sea reptile swam while dinosaurs walked on land. Everyone calls them dinos, but they were a different branch of reptiles.

Lived

184 to 169 million years ago5

Early Jurassic to Middle Jurassic

Fossils found in

Bearreraig Bay, Isle of Skye, Scotland, UK1

Food

Meat2

Length

4.3 m3 4

estimate

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

How big was it?

How long was it?

as long as 4 dogs nose to tailas long as 24 bananas end to end

How big was Dearcmhara compared to YOU?

Just maths in your browser. Nothing is saved or sent anywhere.

cool stuff

Fun facts

Dearcmhara is known from only a few bones: a humerus (upper arm bone) and three vertebrae (back bones).1

Its name comes from Scottish Gaelic and means 'marine lizard'.1

Dearcmhara lived about 184 to 169 million years ago, during the Early to Middle Jurassic.2

It was a basal neoichthyosaurian, meaning it was an early relative of later ichthyosaurs like Ophthalmosaurus.1

The fossils were collected by a man named Brian Shawcross in 1959, and he donated them to a museum instead of keeping them.1

Dearcmhara is one of the first ichthyosaurs from Scotland to be described in detail by scientists.1

Its humerus has a unique deep concavity and a large triangular process that help scientists tell it apart from other ichthyosaurs.1

AI-made picture of Dearcmhara — An AI-made picture of how Dearcmhara might have looked, made by a computer from what scientists know. It is a guess: the real animal may have looked different, and nobody knows its true colours.

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For dino experts

Scientific name: Dearcmhara
Named by: Brusatte et al. 20155
Group: Ichthyosaurs
Family / clade: Neoichthyosauria5
Classification: Ichthyosauria > Ichthyosauromorpha5
Age of the rocks: 184 to 169 million years (Toarcian / Bajocian)5
Rock formations: Bearreraig Sandstone5
Countries: United Kingdom5
Fossil records: 1 in the Paleobiology Database5
Discovery: Dearcmhara was named in 2015 by a team led by Stephen Brusatte. The fossils were found by Brian Shawcross in 1959 on the Isle of Skye, Scotland, and later donated to the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow.1
Still debated: Scientists are not sure exactly how big Dearcmhara was, because only a few bones have been found.1

Where the facts come from

Ichthyosaurs from the Jurassic of Skye, Scotland (orbi.uliege.be)
PBDB Taxon (paleobiodb.org)
Dearcmhara (en.wikipedia.org)
Motorboat-Size Sea Monster Found, Sheds Insight on Evolution | National Geographic (nationalgeographic.com)
Dearcmhara in The Paleobiology Database (CC BY 4.0): age, places, rock formations, classification.

Every fact on this page has a number that points to its source. If we got something wrong, sorry, we are dino fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.

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