| Dr. Jennifer Hogler--one of the premiere ichthyosaur specialists in the world--with a model of an ichthyosaur in hand--and the fossil quarry directly behind her (the quarry is composed of a carbonate bed in the "shaley limestone member" of Luning Formation)--discusses late Triassic times in what is today Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park, Nye County, Nevada--a vast, arid Great Basin land that roughly 218 million years ago was a tropical sea situated just north of the equator. |