By: Yuxi Nan

In May 2020, on an English beach in Braunton, England, 11-year old Ruby Reynolds had a shocking find while fossil hunting with her father Justin Reynold. A piece of fossilized bone about 8 inches long was lying on the beach. “We were both excited as we have never found a piece of fossilized bone as big as this before,” Her father, Mr Reynold, said. “And it wasn’t long before she found a much larger piece of bone.”

After the find, Ruby and Mr. Reynold took the fragments of bone home to do research on them. With some help from a 2018 research paper, they found out that the fossil was from a very massive and extinct reptile, the ichthyosaur. It turns out, a 12-year old girl named Mary Anning who lived nearby in 1811 had also found similar bone fragments. According to the paper, the fragments were believed to have been pieces of a jawbone that belonged to another ichthyosaur that lived about 202 million years ago.

Mr. Reynold contacted some researchers, Dean Lomax, at the university of Bristol, and Paul de la Salle, an amateur fossil collector, and estimated that the ichthyosaur was about 28ft long and the size of a blue whale, making it the biggest marine reptile scientists have found over the years. They have also estimated that the ichthyosaur lived right before the massive extinction that ended the Triassic Period.

Ruby’s find has helped more people to recognize the importance of amateur fossil collectors and help us uncover the history and science of our world.