By: Sammy Wang

In late May 2020, a casual expedition between 11-year-old Ruby Reynold, and her father, Justin Reynolds for fossil hunting would lead to the discovery of something big, massive, and unexpected.

The father daughter duo drove to Blue Anchor, a seaside village in Somerset in southwest England, and saw something strange poking out of the beach. It was a four inch long fossilized bone that Justin claimed was, “bigger than any piece of bone I’d ever found before. I was very excited and sat down to have a good look at it.”

It wasn’t long before Ruby found a second bone covered in a mud slope. This bone was in better shape than the first and was twice as long.

Later they would soon find out with the help of experts from the University of Bristol that they had come across the fossils of the largest marine reptile from over 202 million years ago.

The name of this extinct prehistoric reptile? The ichthyosaur.

Ichthyosaurs inhabited the ocean during the Triassic Period and were at the top of the food chain before they went extinct. Their looks were akin to sharks with added features of fins, four flippers, and a long snout with many sharp teeth.

“These are reptiles only very, very distantly related to things like crocodiles,” says Dean Lomax, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol. “And they actually resemble whales…They committed entirely to a life at sea — they didn’t come onto land.”

The end of the Triassic Period was known as the Great Dying, or in other words, mass extinctions of many, many, prehistoric animals. Although the cause of the Great Dying is still unknown, scientists and experts from the Natural History Museum proposed that it could’ve been climate change, an asteroid, volcanic eruptions, ect.

With more discovery of several other fossils with the help of Lorax and his team, the group was able to figure out that the set of bones were the jaws of an ichthyosaur.

As of now in 2024, 15-year-old Ruby has set out on a path of a paleontologist and says she is proud to be in part of this discovery.

“It was so cool to discover part of this gigantic ichthyosaur. I am very proud to have played a part in a scientific discovery like this,” she said.

Sources:
https://www.npr.org/2024/05/06/1248523748/father-daughter-find-ichthyosaur-largest-marine-reptile#:~:text=In%20late%20May%202020%2C%2011,the%20top%20of%20the%20beach.
https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/father-daughter-202-million-year-old-fossil-find-could-be-largest-prehistoric-marine-reptile
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/the-triassic-period-the-rise-of-the-dinosaurs.html#:~:text=The%20Triassic%20ended%20much%20as,Ocean%20experienced%20massive%20volcanic%20activity.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/20/world/ichthyosaur-fossil-science-newsletter-wt-scn/index.html