Family
Valid Extinct

Leptonectidae

Maisch 1998

Leptonectidae is a family of ichthyosaurs known from Late Triassic to Early Jurassic marine deposits in Europe. They were all small to medium-sized creatures, most noted for their very long, swordfish-like snouts, which could have been used like a weapon, slashing through schools of fish.

Temporal range
Triassic
Jurassic
Cretaceous
Paleogene
Neogene
252 201 145 66 0 Ma
PBDB occurrences
2
Group
Ichtyosaures
Carnivore nektonic Marine
Leptonectidae
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Exhibit in the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. This exhibit is old enough so that it is in the public domain, and photography was permitted in the museum. I took this photograph and release it into the public domain. © Daderot · CC0 · Wikimedia
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Classification
Ichthyosauria Unranked clade
›
Parvipelvia Unranked clade
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Neoichthyosauria Unranked clade
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Leptonectidae Family
Fossil sites 2 geolocated sites
Distribution
Top countries
🇬🇧 United Kingdom
2
Geological formations
Scunthorpe Mudstone
1
Charmouth Mudstone
1
Temporal distribution
Pliensbachian (192.9–184.2 Ma)
1
Hettangian (201.4–199.5 Ma)
1
Synonyms (1)
Eurhinosauria objective synonym of Leptonectidae
Images 3
Bibliography
Original description
M. W. Maisch and A. G. Reisdorf. 2006. Evidence for the longest stratigraphic range of a post-Triassic Ichthyosaur: a Leptonectes tenuirostris from the Pliensbachian (Lower Jurassic) of Switzerland. Geobios 39:491-505 DOI ↗
Bibliography (2)
D. R. Lomax, J. A. Massare, and E. E. Maxwell. 2025. A new long and narrow‐snouted ichthyosaur illuminates a complex faunal turnover during an undersampled Early Jurassic (Pliensbachian) interval. Papers in Palaeontology 11(5):e70038 DOI ↗
D. R. Lomax. 2017. A new leptonectid ichthyosaur from the Lower Jurassic (Hettangian) of Nottinghamshire, England, UK, and the taxonomic usefulness of the ichthyosaurian coracoid. Journal of Systematic Palaeontology 15(5):387-401 DOI ↗