Plate with 12 Ichthyosaur Tail Vertebra Plus Belemnite

This is a really unique plate containing 13 ichthyosaur vertebra which would have come from the beginning of it's tail. Four of the verts are complete and the rest are unfortunately running of the edge of the piece of rock on which it was found in the quarry. There is also a really cool addition to the plate, a long Belemnite which runs through the plate and is exposed on the back side along with several shellfish fossils.

The plate itself is 9x7 inches in length and the vertebra average about 1 inch wide. The preservation is very nice and it's been cleaned using air abrasives with no restoration. It comes from the Posidonia Shale Formation formation in Germany which is approximately 183 million years old (Early Jurassic)

Ichthyosaurs ("Fish Lizard") was a giant marine reptile which thrived from much of the Mesozoic era. They evolved in the mid Triassic from a group of unidentified land reptiles which transition back into the water. This line evolved in parallel to the ancestors of todays dolphins and whales, something known as convergent evolution.

Belemnites were an extinct order of cephalopods (think shelled squid) that lived during the Mesozoic era.