By: Hannah Yang

Ruby Reynolds and her father, Justice Reynolds found a piece of fossilized rock close to their home in Braunton, England, in May of 2020. What they found was later identified as a piece of ichthyosaur’s jaw.

What exactly is an ichthyosaur
An ichthyosaur, whose name originates from the ancient Greek word “fish lizard”, is a group of large extinct marine reptile. Evidence has shown that this reptile thrived during the Mesozoic Era, which is about 252 to 65 million years ago. Scientific research suggests that during the early Triassic period, about 252-201 million years ago, the ichthyosaurs evolved from unknown land-dwelling reptiles and became marine animals.

Fossils show that an ichthyosaur is about 2 to 4 meters, or about 6.56 feet to 13.12 feet, in length. Some individual specimens were only about 0.3 meters or one foot, and some species were much larger. The earliest member of the ichthyosaur family resembled an eel, while later findings show they had evolved to look more like dolphins, having a porpoise-like faces, short necks, and long snouts.

How the fossilized bone was found
When Ruby Reynolds and her father were on a family vacation, Justin Reynolds came across a four-inches long fossilized bone on a rock at the top of the beach. It was “bigger than any piece of bone I’d ever found before,” says Mr. Reynolds. “So I was very excited and sat down to have a good look at it.”
Meanwhile, Ruby found a larger and better-preserved fossilized bone in a mud slope.

Ruby and her father would later find out that the bones belonged to the largest known marine reptile– a giant ichthyosaur.

The result of this finding
The pair took the two bones back to their home, where they immediately started to search for clues on what the fossils could be. A paper written in 2018 gave them an answer. In a nearby town called Lilstock, fossil hunters had found similar bone fragments, hypothesized to be part of the jawbone of an ichthyosaur. But, the researchers who had studied the fragments didn’t have enough pieces to confirm their suspicions.

Justin Reynolds contacted the scientists who had written the article, and together, they searched through the mud for more pieces of the ichthyosaur’s jaw. They found about half a bone estimated to be about 7 feet if complete.

Many features on the bone suggested that it was a jawbone, but just to have more confirmation, the researchers contacted Marcello Perillo, a paleontologist who worked with the University of Bonn in Germany. Under a microscope, he confirmed it was an ichthyosaur by its distinct collagen fibers.

“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, one of the researchers Mr. Reynolds contacted, said. “That’s when it got really exciting.”