British girl and father discover a giant reptile that is 200 million years old

A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England, belongs to a giant marine reptile dating back 202 million years and appears to be among the largest animals ever to walk the planet.

Researchers said Wednesday that the bone, called a surangular, came from a type of ocean reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic-period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22 and 26 meters long.

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That would make it perhaps the largest known marine reptile and could rival some of the largest baleen whales alive today. The blue whale, considered the largest animal ever to live on Earth, can grow to about 30 meters in length.

Marine reptiles ruled the world’s oceans when dinosaurs dominated the land. Ichthyosaurs, which evolved from land-based ancestors and thrived for about 160 million years before disappearing about 90 million years ago, came in different sizes and shapes, ate fish, squid relatives and other marine reptiles and gave birth to live young.

Ichthyotitan is only known from two jawbones, the one found by Ruby Reynolds and her father Justin Reynolds in 2020 in Blue Anchor, Somerset, and another from another Ichthyotitan individual found in 2016, along the Somerset coast near Lilstock.

“It’s quite remarkable to think that giant ichthyosaurs the size of blue whales were swimming in the oceans around the time Triassic dinosaurs were making landfall in what is now Britain,” says university paleontologist Dean Lomax. . from Manchester and the University of Bristol, lead author of the study published in the journal PLOS ONE

Ruby Reynolds, who was 11 at the time and is now 15, was fossil hunting on the beach with her father when they spotted a piece of the surangular. Ruby continued to search the area and found a second piece – much larger than the first – partially buried in a mud slope. They then contacted Lomax, an ichthyosaur expert, and additional parts of the bone were excavated.

Ruby Reynolds’ role in the discovery has led to comparisons with Mary Anning, the 19th-century British fossil hunter and anatomist who, among other things, discovered ichthyosaur fossils when she was 12.

“I think Mary Anning was an incredible paleontologist and it’s amazing to be compared to her,” said Ruby Reynolds.

“It was a wonderful, insightful and fun experience working with these experts, and we are proud to be part of the team and co-authors of a scientific paper naming a new species and genus,” added Justin Reynolds.

Fossil collector Paul de la Salle discovered that the remains from 2016 are now attributed to Ichthyotitan.

The sheer size of Ichthyotitan was awe-inspiring.

“Discoveries like these create incredible moments when we are humbled by our size and place in the world. To hear that an animal of this size once swam through our oceans, felt the same warmth from the sun, breathed our air and then disappeared gives us a chance to see how important each species is to the fragile yet resilient fabric of the human race. life,” said Florida-based paleontologist and study co-author Jimmy Waldron.

Ichthyotitan was a member of a family of giant ichthyosaurs called Shastasauridae, and lived 13 million years later than any others known so far, suggesting
these behemoths survived until a global mass extinction event that doomed countless species of animals about 201 million years ago, at the end of the Triassic.

No fossils of the rest of Ichthyotitan’s skeleton have been discovered, but researchers were able to distinguish its appearance based on other members of the family, including Shonisaurus from British Columbia, Canada.

The surangular is a long, curved bone at the top of the lower jaw, just behind the teeth, present in almost all living or extinct vertebrates, except mammals. Muscles attached to this bone generate bite force.

“In T. rex, the surangular is more than half a meter long. The surangular that Ruby and her father found stretched for more than two meters (7 feet). This not only translates into the reach of what the animal was really like huge, but it gives us an indication that it had a lot of support behind its bite,” said Waldron, founder of the mobile dinosaur museum Dinosaurs Will Always Be Awesome.