By: Brady Cheng

Ruby Reynolds, an 11-year-old girl, found a piece of fossilized bone in the village of Blue Anchor, England.

She and her father had been fossil hunting for 12 years. In May 2020, they came to a village with the name of Blue Anchor on a family outing. They found a very large piece of fossilized bone. Mr. Reynolds added, “We were both excited as we had never found a piece of fossilized bone as big as this before.”

Ruby decided to search for more, and she soon found another piece of bone, even larger than the one before. They took the fossils home and began researching what fossils they were. They learned that nearby fossil hunters also discovered similar fossils thought to be from an ichthyosaur. But scientists had declared that fossil was too incomplete to make a new species.

Mr. Reynolds contacted researchers to help them dig in Blue Anchor. They found half a bone that would be 7 feet long if it was whole. It showed that it was the jaw of an ichthyosaur. The researchers gave it to a paleontologist named Marcello Perillo, and he carefully examined it under his microscope, and found crisscrossed collagen fibers that were common in ichthyosaurs. “Having two examples of the same bone that preserved all the same unique features, from the same geologic time zone, supported the identification that we’ve kind of toyed around with before, that it’s got to be something new,” Dr. Lomax said. “That’s when it got really exciting.”

They knew it was a new kind of ichthyosaur. They named it Ichthyotitan severnensis, which means, the giant fish lizard of the Severn.