When Ruby Reynolds and her father found a fossil on an English beach, they didn’t know it belonged to an ichthyosaur regarding 25 meters long that swam during the time of the dinosaurs.
In 1811, a 12-year-old girl named Mary Anning discovered a fossil on the beach near her home in southwestern England: it was the first scientifically identified specimen of an ichthyosaur, a dinosaur-like oceanic reptile from the age of the dinosaurs. Dolphin. Two centuries later, less than 50 miles away, an 11-year-old girl named Ruby Reynolds found a fossil of another ichthyosaur. It appears to be the largest marine reptile known to science.
Reynolds, now 15, and his father, Justin Reynolds, have been searching for fossils near their home in Braunton, England, for 12 years. On a family outing in May 2020 to the village of Blue Anchor, next to the Severn River estuary, they came across a piece of fossilized bone on a rock.
“We were both excited because we had never found such a large piece of fossilized bone,” Reynolds said. Her daughter continued searching the beach, she added, “and soon found another, much larger piece of bone.”
They took home the bone fragments, the largest of which measured regarding 20 centimeters, and began their investigation. A 2018 article gave them a clue as to what they had found: in the nearby town of Lilstock, fossil hunters had discovered similar bone fragments, the hypothesis being that they were part of the jaw of a huge ichthyosaur that lived approximately 202 years ago. millions of years. However, scientists who had worked on the Lilstock fossil had considered that specimen too incomplete to designate a new species.
Reynolds contacted those researchers: Dean Lomax, of the University of Bristol, and Paul de la Salle, an amateur fossil collector. They joined the Reynolds family on collecting trips to Blue Anchor, digging in the mud with shovels. In the end, they found regarding half a bone that, according to their calculations, would have measured more than two meters when complete.
Several features of the bone’s shape indicate that it came from the jaw of an ichthyosaur. To confirm its identity, the researchers collaborated with Marcello Perillo, a paleontologist at the University of Bonn in Germany. Under the microscope, he found criss-crossing collagen fibers, a feature of ichthyosaurs. He also saw that, despite the gigantic size of the jaw bone, the reptile had not finished growing when he died.
Together, the Blue Anchor and Lilstock fossils offered evidence of something special.
“Having two examples of the same bone that retain all the same unique characteristics, from the same geological era, supported the identification that we had played with before, which is that it has to be something new,” Lomax said. “That’s when it got really exciting.”
He and his co-authors, who describe the fossil in a paper published in the journal PLOS One on Wednesday, called it Ichthyotitan severnensisthe gigantic lizardfish of the Severn.
Their estimates suggest that Ichthyotitan might have been up to 25 meters long, rivaling even the size of a blue whale and making it the largest marine reptile known to science. He lived just before a mass extinction that ended the Triassic Period.
“Inevitably, in big extinction events, of course, the big things are the first to go, and in this case, literally the biggest things in the ocean, they were wiped out, and this whole family was gone,” Lomax said.
Erin Maxwell, a paleontologist at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart in Germany, who was not involved in the study, said the find sheds light on the evolution of ichthyosaurs. “There used to be indications that these giant ichthyosaurs existed near the boundary between the Triassic and Jurassic periods, but the amount of evidence is becoming incontrovertible at this point,” she said.
Lomax said this discovery also highlights the importance of amateur fossil collectors. “If you have a good eye, if you are passionate regarding something like this, you can make discoveries like this,” he said.
Ruby Reynolds said: “When I first found the piece of ichthyosaur bone I didn’t realize how important it was and what was going to happen. “I think the role young people can play in science is to enjoy the journey of exploration, as you never know where a discovery may take you.”
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