Fossil finds on Somerset beach are from ‘largest marine reptile’
Fossils discovered by an 11-year-old girl on a beach in Somerset may have come from the largest marine reptile ever to have lived, say experts.
The fossils are thought to be from a type of ichthyosaur, believed to have roamed the seas towards the end of the Triassic, about 202m years ago.
The species has been named Ichthyotitan severnensis, meaning “giant fish lizard of the Severn”.
“This giant probably represents the largest marine reptile formally described,” said Dr Dean Lomax, a palaeontologist at the University of Bristol, adding that comparisons with fossils from other ichthyosaurs suggested the creature would have been about 25 metres in length.
“Of course, we have to be careful with such estimates because we are dealing with fragments of giant bones,” he added. “But nonetheless, simple scaling is commonly used to estimate size, especially when comparative material is scarce.”
The team say samples from the fossils suggest the creature was still growing. And there is another twist.
“We believe these ichthyosaurs are the last surviving members of the family called shastasauridae, which went extinct during the global mass extinction event at the end of the Triassic,” said Lomax.
Writing in the journal Plos One, Lomax and colleagues report how the first pieces of the jawbone were discovered by Justin Reynolds and his daughter Ruby – co-authors of the paper – on the beach at Blue Anchor in May 2020, when Ruby was 11.
The pair contacted Lomax, who joined the search for further pieces. Also joining the hunt was Paul de la Salle, from the Museum of Jurassic Marine Life in Dorset, who in 2016 had discovered a jawbone from what appeared to be a new species of ichthyosaur at a beach in Somerset.
When the team fitted the fragments of the new fossil together they found it belonged to the same species as the specimen discovered by De la Salle.