It was an ordinary day. In 1811, a 12-year-old girl named Mary Anning discovered a fossil on the beach near her home in southwestern England - the first scientifically identified specimen of an ichthyosaur, a dolphin like, ocean-dwelling reptile from the time of the dinosaurs. Fast forward two decades later....less than 50 miles away, an 11-year-old girl named Ruby Reynolds found a fossil from another ichthyosaur. It appears to be the largest marine reptile known to science. Now what are the chances of that happening? Reynolds, now 15, and her father Justin have been fossil hunting for 12 years near their home in Braunton, England. On a family outing in May of 2020 to the village of Blue Anchor along the estuary of the River Severn, they came across a piece of fossilized bone set on a rock. "We were both excited as we had never found a piece of fossilized bone as big as this before," Justin said. They took home the fragments of the 8 inch bone, and began their research. A 2018 newspaper provided a hint at what they'd found: In nearby Lilstock, fossil hunters had discovered similar bone fragments, hypothesized to be part of the jaw bone of a massive ichthyosaur that lived roughly 202 million years ago. However, the scientists who'd worked on the Lilstock fossil had deemed that specimen too incomplete to designate a new species. Justin contacted researchers Dean Lomax, at the University of Bristol, and Paul de la Salle, an amateur fossil collector. They joined the Reynolds family on collecting trips in Blue Anchor, digging in the mud with shovels. Ultimately, they found roughly half of a bone that they estimate would have been more than 7 feet long when complete. Several features of the bone's shape indicate that it came from an ichthyosaur's jaw. To further confirm its identity, the researchers collaborated with Marcello Perillo, a paleontologist with the University of Bonn in Germany. Under a microscope, he found criscrosed collagen fibers, an ichthyosaur trait. He also saw that despite the giant size of the jaw bone, the reptile hadn't finished growing when it died. Taken together, the fossils from Blue Anchor and Lilstock offered evidence of something special. Having two samples of the same bone that presented all the same unique features, from the same geologic time zone, and supported the identification that we've kind of toyed around with before - that it's got to be something new," Lomax said. "That's when it got really exiting." He and his co-authors of a paper describing the fossil in the journal "PLOS One" this month and named it Ichthyotitan severnensis, the giant fish lizard of the Severn. Their estimates suggest Ihthyotitan could have been up to 82 feet long, rivaling the size of a blue whale and making it the largest marine reptile known to science. It lived right before an extinction that ended the Triassic Period. "Inevitably with the big extinction events, of course, it's the big thing that goes first, and in this case, literally the biggest things in the ocean wiped out, and this entire family disappears," Lomax said. Erin Maxwell, a paleontologist at the State Museum of Natural History, Stuttgart in Germany who was not involved with the study, said that the find sheds light on ichthyosaurs evolution. "Before, there were hints that there were these giant ichthyosaurs approaching the TriassicJurassic boundary," Maxwell said, "but the amount of evidence is becoming incontrovertible at this point." So...perhaps this young girl's fossil find really might set a record. It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.
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| Dean, Ruby, Justin and Paul |
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