The driest desert on Earth was once sea floor, and it keeps returning evidence of the fact. Researchers of the Universidad de Chile's Red Paleontológica, working with the Núcleo Milenio EVOTEM, have described Gondwananectes osvaldoi, the first plesiosaur species from the Jurassic period ever identified in Chile. The animal, a marine reptile between 1.5 and 2 metres long, swam in waters covering what is now the area around Calama, in the Antofagasta Region, roughly 170 million years ago.
The fossil's path to publication is a study in patience. The skeleton was found in 2014, but only painstaking preparation between 2024 and 2025 exposed enough anatomy to confirm it as a species new to science, formally described in Papers in Palaeontology. Jurassic plesiosaurs are scarce in the southern hemisphere, so a well-preserved specimen from Gondwanan latitudes carries weight far beyond Chile, forcing reappraisals of how these marine reptile lineages were distributed globally.
For Chilean palaeontology the find extends a remarkable run by the same network, which has previously delivered the armoured dinosaur Stegouros elengassen from Patagonia and the titanosaur Arackar licanantay from the Atacama. Each discovery strengthens the case that Chile's north, long prospected mainly for copper, is also one of South America's richest windows onto Mesozoic marine life, and that local collections and preparators can carry a specimen from desert outcrop to international journal.