 The curved flippers would have allowed them to be kept close to the body, thus increasing their mechanical advantage.Motani and colleagues suggested that other traits of "Cartorhynchus" would also have aided an amphibious lifestyle, including the short trunk and snout, and the thickened ribs (which would have served as a ballast, stabilizing the animal in near-shore waters).A 2019 study by Susana Gutarra and colleagues used computational simulations to estimate the energy cost of swimming in ichthyosauriforms.