cylindrical, suggesting that it probably swam with an eel-like motion. Classification Ryosuke Motani from the University of California, Berkeley, and Nachio Minoura and Tatsuro Ando from Hokkaido University re-examined the fossils of Utatsusaurus in 1998 using computer imagery to reverse the distortion of the original skeleton. They found that Utatsusaurus was closely related to the lizard-like diapsid reptiles such as Petrolacosaurus, making ichthyopterygians a distant relative to lizards, snakes and crocodiles. They also used phylogenetic analyses and concluded that ichthyosaurs were a member of the Diapsida and the sister group of the Sauria.Additionally, in 2013, Cuthbertson and colleagues from the University of Calgary, Canada, using phylogenetic analyses, reported that Ichthyopterygia is a monophyletic group and Utatsusaurus and Parvinatator are a basal clade. Destruction of the Gyoryū-kan Minamisanriku-cho, Japan is a renowned place which has yielded a number of fossils of ichthyosaurs and the holotype specimen of Utatsusaurus. A museum (called Gyoryū-kan (魚竜館), literally translating as "a house of fish-dragons") was built to keep and display those fossils, and over sixty thousand people had visited there a year. However, on Friday 11 March 2011, the museum was destroyed during the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. At the time of the earthquake, the fossils of Utatsusaurus were kept at another place, and the majority of the other fossils displayed at the museum were salvaged, but the museum, itself has not yet been restored and reopened. See also List of ichthyosaurs List of ichthyosaur type specimens Timeline of ichthyosaur research References Sources Triassic ichthyopterygians Early Triassic reptiles of Asia Early Triassic reptiles of North America Ichthyosauromorph genera