A fishing rod, a camera and a serendipitous series of photos later, and Nannopterygius enthekiodon no longer seems that rare. In fact, it turns out that the long-extinct sea creature and others like it were among the most common of their day.

The story of scientific desperation starts at the Russian Academy of Sciences. Zverkov scoured European collections for fossils of similar-seeming species of the aquatic reptiles, which flourished in ancient seas starting about 250 million years ago. As dinosaurs stomped over the land, they swam through warm, shallow seas over a period of about 76 million years.

Zverkov wondered if Nannopterygius enthekiodon, a five-foot-long ichthyosaur, shared similarities with specimens in museums around the Arctic, but was stymied by the inconvenient location of its skeleton. So he attached his camera to a fishing rod, selfie stick style, and held it up high. Then he sent the images to Megan L. Jacobs, a paleontologist earning her doctorate at Baylor University. She told him that its skeleton was similar to other ichthyosaurs she’d studied in Britain.

They joined forces and concluded that the specimens they’d studied were all part of the same genus. In a paper in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, the paleontologists lay out a case for a reappraisal of the Jurassic creatures, which they say were among the most widespread ichthyosaurs in the Northern Hemisphere. They also identified a brand-new species, Nannopterygius borealis.

“For decades, the scientific community thought that Nannopterygius was the rarest and most poorly known ichthyosaur of England,” Zverkov said in a news release. “Finally, we can say that we know nearly every skeletal detail of these small ichthyosaurs and that these animals were widespread. The answer was very close; what was needed was just a fishing rod.”