Hi. Thanks for sharing these photos. Unfortunately I cannot tell which element this could be. It has a very odd shape and I wonder if it might be part of a sea turtle. A Campanian tetrapod from Ukraine is surely an interesting find.

This photo shows the holotype specimen of Plesionectes at the Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Stuttgart. 2/2

The skin of the ichthyosaur from Holzmaden, #Germany, was smooth, not bearing any scales or scutes. We found also remnants of internal organs and of blubber, an analogue to modern whales, which led to the conclusion that ichthyosaurs were warm-blooded.
#ichthyosaur #fossil #nature

A new page will be added on Monday, when our paper on a new plesiosaur genus and species from Germany is out.
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Here’s a link to the publication: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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I'm grateful to the finder, Georg Göltz, for contacting me, allowing its description, and donating this significant specimen to the Palaeontological Museum in Nierstein. Thanks also to project leader Johan Lindgren, my co-author Dean Lomax, and to Joschua for the fantastic palaeoart! 6/7

Temnodontosaurus had the largest eyes of any vertebrate known, which support the hypothesis that this aquatic reptile hunted under low-light conditions. 5/7

This, together with the flipper's wing-like shape and serrated edge, collectively indicates that this morphology helped the massive animal to minimize sound production during swimming. 4/7

Temnodontosaurus was the largest megapredator of the Lower Jurassic (more than 10 m long). The flipper lacks bones at the distal end, which show that the soft-tissue flipper was much longer than the bones indicate. 3/7

The nearly 1m-long front flipper, found in 2009 by Georg Göltz in Dotternhausen, Germany, is Lower Jurassic in age. It preserves a serrated trailing edge with unique rod-like structures we've named 'chondroderms.' 2/7
#paleontology #biology #germany

Further reading: www.paleophilatelie.eu/description/...
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The specimen has initially named Peloneustes irgisensis and then became a new genus, Strongylokrotaphus. It has later been referred to Pliosaurus and is currently considered to be an indeterminate thalassophonean. The fossils are now at the Palaeontological Institute (PIN) in Moscow. 3/4