By: Timothy Xia

11 year-old Ruby Reynolds and her dad, Justin Reynolds were searching for fossils on a beach in Braunton, England in the village of Blue Anchor when she spotted something unusual. She went to see what it was and found bone fragments on sets of rocks. Ruby kept searching and later found a jawbone that was much larger than the other fossils. They later found out that the bone fragments were from an ichthyosaur, a prehistoric marine creature that lived for roughly 160 million years. The ichthyosaur was a dolphin-like creature longer than a school bus. It was a little bigger than the current Blue Whale. The biggest bone that they found was from the ichthyosaur that measured about 82 feet long. When they found it, the Reynolds were both very excited because the bone fragments were huge, the largest measuring 8 inches long. Ruby, now 15 years old, and her dad had been looking for fossils for about 12 years around their home in England.

What Did They Do?

Right after they found the bone fragments, they began researching them. They found out from a 2018 document that this was an ichthyosaur that lived about 202 million years ago and what they found was the jawbone of an ichthyosaur. They invited some researchers to help them with their research. The researchers who helped the Reynolds were Dean Lomax, a researcher at University of Bristol and Paul de la Salle, who is interested in fossil finding. They helped Ruby find some more fossils. After a lot of digging, they found another ichthyosaur’s bone fragments about half the length that Ruby found. Based on the research they had done, they knew that it was an ichthyosaur jawbone because of a paleontologist named Marcello Perillo from University of Bonn. He found out that both of the bones had multiple ichthyosaur traits. They all were very excited because the two jawbones had almost all the same traits.

What did this lead to?

This discovery was very important and later, scientists knew a lot more about the ichthyosaur. They found out that the ichthyosaur was evolving and that the biggest ichthyosaur lived during the time of the dinosaurs. From the jawbone, scientists found that the ichthyosaur can hunt down sea beasts big or small. The ichthyosaur lived right before the mass extinction in the Triassic period, which is about 250 million years ago just before the dinosaurs came in. They disappeared and repopulated twice after the asteroid that crashed and killed the dinosaurs. It lived until the last one died about 90 million years ago. Scientists also knew a lot more about the ichthyosaur after the discovery. Justin Reynolds later said that when they found it, they didn’t realize how important this discovery was and what role it played in discoveries.

source from:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/17/science/ichthyosaur-fossil-largest.html