By: Eunice Yeung

When Ruby Reynolds went fossil hunting at a beach, she didn’t expect to find the biggest reptile that flew during the age of the dinosaurs.

Ruby Reynolds and her father live in England, near a beach, so Ruby often spends her time walking down the beach shore, looking for shells and fossils. One day, in May 2020, she and her father spotted something big in the sand when they were at a family outing. “We were both excited as we had never found a piece of fossilized bone as big as this before,” Mr. Reynolds said. Ruby kept searching the shore, looking for more fossils. “It wasn’t long before she found another much larger piece of bone,” her father added.

They took the piece of the fossil home, did some research on it, and soon learned that it was a piece of jawbone of a massive ichthyosaur. They contacted some researchers: Dean Lomax, from the University of Bristol, and Paul de La Salle, an amateur fossil collector. They soon came over to the beach to search for more fossils together.

The professors estimated the wingspan of the ichthyosaur, whose jawbone Ruby found, was more than 7 feet. The professors’ estimates suggested that the ichthyosaur could have grown up to 82 feet before it died.