By: Cindy Pu
In May 2020, 11-year-old Ruby Reynolds and her father, Justin Reynolds, found a large, rare fossil in Somerset, England when they had gone fossil hunting on an English beach.
At first, Ruby and her father hadn’t known what the fossilized bones were. Soon, with the help of researchers Dean Lomax, Paul de la Salle, and Marcello Perillo, they found out that the fossil belonged to the 82-foot ichthyosaur, a marine species that lived during the days when dinosaurs were roaming the Earth.
The Reynolds found the first bone fragment when they first arrived at Lilstock beach in Somerset, England. It was about 4 inches long. Ruby’s father went closer to get a good look at the bone fragment. Meanwhile, Ruby kept walking along the beach, scanning the ground for more fossilized bones. Soon she found another bone fragment twice as long as the first one half sticking out of the ground. “It was just sort of lying there,” Ruby said.
After they found the fragments of bone, they took them home to do research. The first clue to what they had found was from a 2018 research paper. In the paper, the authors mentioned that in Lilstock, a beach in Somerset, England, similar bone fragments had been found years before. The bone fragments were hypothesized as pieces of an ichthyosaur’s jawbone, but the fossil was too incomplete to be deemed as a species.
Ruby and her father suspected that there were more of the bone fragments laying under the mud and sand of the beach, so they contacted Dean Lomax of the University of Bristol and Paul de la Salle, a fossil collector, to help them try to dig up some more fossil fragments. They had found roughly half of an ichthyosaur jawbone by the time they were done. Together with Marcello Perillo, a paleontologist, they examined the fossils under a microscope, and found crisscrossed collagen fibers, which was evidence of an ichthyosaur trait. They also discovered that the ichthyosaur could have been up to 82-feet long.
Ruby Reynolds said that many more young people can enjoy the journey of exploring science.