By: Nelson Zhang
11-year-old Ruby Reynolds and her father went to an English Beach and found an ordinary fossil but didn’t know it belonged to an 82-foot Ichthyosaur that swam in the ocean during the time of the dinosaurs.
Around 1811, 12-year-old Mary Anning was at a nearby beach to her home in southwestern England and discovered a fossil. Little did she know that it was the first scientifically identified specimen of an ichthyosaur, a dolphin-shaped reptile that roamed the seas. Two centuries later May of 2020, an 11-year-old girl named Ruby Reynolds found another fossil belonging to an ichthyosaur less than 50 miles away in ….
Ruby Reynolds, who is 15 now, and her father, Justin Reynolds have been fossil hunting for 12 years near their home in Braunton, England. After traveling to rural areas in May 2020, they went to the village of Blue Anchor along the estuary of the River Severn where they came across a fossil engraved to a stone.
“We were both excited as we had never found a piece of fossilized bone as big as this before,” Mr. Reynolds said. As her daughter Ruby Reynolds kept searching the beach for more fossils, “and it wasn’t long before she found another much larger piece of bone.”
After they went back home, they took some pieces that were as big as 8 inches and started to do research. In a 2018 research paper, ,they found out that parts of the jawbone of a massive ichthyosaur had been found in the same area. According to scientists, the ichthyosaur is the biggest known marine reptile.
Mr. Reynolds contacted Dean Lomaxat the University of Bristol, and Paul de la Salle, a fossil collector. They went to Blue Anchor to meet up with the Reynolds. They thought they had found half of the bone, but the researchers estimated that the full bone was around 7 feet when completed.
To confirm that the bones belonged to a massive ichthyosaur, they met up with Marcello Perillo, a paleontologist with the University of Bonn in Germany. They found out that the ichthyosaur hadn’t finished growing but was around 82 feet!
Dr. Lomax stated that importance of amateur fossil collectors, “If you have a keen eye, if you have a passion for something like that, you can make discoveries like this,” he said.
Ms. Reynolds said, “I didn’t realize when I first found the piece of ichthyosaur bone how important it was and what it would lead to. I think the role that young people can play in science is to enjoy the journey of exploring as you never know where a discovery may take you.”