By: Nina He
Imagine being an 82-foot long dolphin-like creature swimming deep under the ocean. Now imagine that 202 million years later an 11-year-old girl finding its fossilized bones nearly 202 million years later. But this isn’t just in your imagination—it’s the truth!
On an English beach less than 50 miles away, an 11-year-old girl named Ruby Reynolds found a bone that belonged to an ichthyosaur, the largest marine reptile known.
Ms. Reynolds and her father, Justin Reynolds, had been fossil hunting on a beach near Braunton, England. After finding a large, fossilized bone, Ms. Reynolds kept searching the beach, and she found a bigger piece of bone.
“We were both excited as we had never found a piece of fossilized bone as big as this before,” Mr. Reynolds said.
Once they had taken the bones home, the two began their research. It turns out that nearby in Listock, some scientists found similar bone fragments of an ichthyosaur. But because of the lack of bones, it was deemed too incomplete to be a new species.
Mr. Reynolds contacted those researchers, Dean Lomax, at the University of Bristol, and Paul de la Salle, an amateur fossil collector. Together, they searched Blue Anchor and found half a bone that might’ve been more than 7 feet long when complete.
The team sent the bones to a paleontologist in Germany, who confirmed that the bones belonged in a ichthyosaur. The paleontologist also found out the creature, estimated to be 82 feet long, wasn’t fully grown when it died.
“Having two examples of the same bone that preserved all the same unique features, from the same geologic time zone, supported the identification that we’ve kind of toyed around with before, that it’s got to be something new,” Dr. Lomax said. “That’s when it got really exciting.”
Dr. Lomaz and his team found out that the ichthyosaur was the largest found, making it the largest marine reptile known. They named it Ichthyotitan severnensis.
“Inevitably with big extinction events of course, it’s the big things that go first, and so in this case, literally the biggest things in the ocean, they are wiped out, and this entire family disappears,” Dr. Lomax said.
This just goes to show that anyone with a passionate heart and a sharp eye can find something as special as the largest marine reptile.
Ruby 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.”