Huge animals = major advantages

They are better at protecting themselves against predators, are more intelligent, and live much longer. On the other hand, nature’s heavyweights will also more easily succumb to mass extinction.

bones found 60 km from the new discovery in a small village by the name of Aust in Southern England 170 years ago.

Over the years, the Aust bones were believed to belong to a series of animals, including several dinosaur and reptile species, but now palaeontologists think otherwise. When they placed the new and the old bones beside each other, the similarities were overwhelming. Again, the special grooves in the bones revealed the relationship between the two finds.

The groove in one of the Aust bones is so much like the groove in the new jawbone that the bones probably came from the same place – and from the same species. And if scientists’ analyses of the about 170yearold bones hold water, the new fish lizard species will grow even more.

When the Aust bone is measured, it paints a picture of a fish lizard that was up to 40 % bigger than the 26 m that Paul de la Salle's fish lizard specimen measured. The giant, to whom the fossilized bones belonged, measured up to 36 m and weighed more than 200 t.

Scientists even emphasize that the two remaining Aust bones might have been located in another place of the jaw than the third one. If so, the fossil’s dimensions indicate that the fish lizard was even bigger than the 3436m. As the two other bones do not have the same characteristic grooves as the jawbone, this is still pure speculation.

However, the palaeontologists can positively conclude that the new fish lizard was a minimum of 2025 m long. That makes the prehistoric lizard the biggest fish lizard species that has ever been excavated in the UK. The data also indicates that this is a very conservative theory and that the animal was probably much bigger.

Moreover, it is very unlikely that the bones excavated 170 years ago in Aust would come from a very large individual. It is much more likely that the bones belonged to an average individual. No matter how long the prehistoric lizard behind the fossilized bones really was, even bigger versions of the species almost certainly existed 200 million years ago.

Scientists search for new lizards

The disclosure of the new fish lizard species once again focuses attention on why some specific species grow extremely large over time. Nature seems to automatically breed ever bigger physical sizes of individuals of the same line of development, i.e. species related in time via evolutionary kinship. In other words: a species which has developed into a