A 40-Foot Sea Monster, a 23-Foot Predator and a Flying Reptile Walk Into the Eromanga Sea

A single fossil from Outback Queensland has frozen an entire predator chain in place: a giant sea reptile with the remains of a flying reptile still in its gut, and its own skeleton marked by the bite of something even bigger.

Fossil hunters found the bones near Richmond in 2019 and donated them to the local Kronosaurus Korner museum, where staff nicknamed the find B.O.B., for bag of bones. Museum curator Kevin Petersen later excavated the rest of the skeleton: a large ichthyosaur, an air-breathing marine reptile built like a cross between a crocodile and a dolphin.

Rock nodules preserved with the skeleton turned out to be stomach contents. Inside one: fragments of a pterosaur jaw, the first direct evidence that this ichthyosaur species ate flying reptiles. The ichthyosaur's own bones tell the rest of the story, showing crushing bite marks and missing sections consistent with an attack by Kronosaurus queenslandicus, the apex predator of Australia's Cretaceous seas.

Between 95 million and 120 million years ago, this stretch of Outback Queensland sat under the Eromanga Sea, a shallow inland ocean covering roughly a third of the continent. Paleontologist Dean Lomax says the specimen offers a rare, near-complete picture of predator relationships across three levels in that ancient ecosystem. What isn't resolved: how the pterosaur ended up in the water in the first place. Researchers suspect at least some ichthyosaurs scavenged flying reptiles that landed on or fell into the sea, but the circumstances remain unknown.

B.O.B. now lives at Kronosaurus Korner Museum in Richmond. Given what's inside him, the name feels earned.

Read the full story at Popular Science, July 29, 2026

Hot Take: The ichthyosaur caught a pterosaur, which by any reasonable standard should have been the story of its life. The Kronosaurus had other plans, and now the ichthyosaur is famous for being eaten rather than for doing the eating. There is something deeply, specifically Cretaceous about that outcome.