A fossil found by an 11-year-old girl on a Somerset beach may be from the largest marine reptile ever discovered, experts say.
The fossils are thought to come from an ichthyosaur, a prehistoric marine reptile that lived during the age of the dinosaurs. The newly discovered species is believed to have roamed the oceans at the end of the Triassic Period (about 202 million years ago).
The research team has named the species Severn Titan, It means “giant fish lizard of the Severn River”.
Dr. Dean Lomax, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol and co-author of the study, said: “This behemoth may represent the largest formally described marine reptile.” He added that comparisons with other ichthyosaur fossils suggest that the organism It is about 25 meters long – about the size of a blue whale.
“Of course, we have to be cautious with such estimates because we are dealing with fragments of giant bones,” he added. “But despite this, simple scaling is often used to estimate size, especially when comparative materials are scarce.”
The team said the fossil samples showed the organisms were still growing. There’s another twist.
“We believe these ichthyosaurs are the last surviving members of the family Shastasauridae, which went extinct during the global mass extinction event at the end of the Triassic,” Lomax said.
Writing in the journal Plos One, Lomax and colleagues report how Justin Reynolds and his daughter Ruby, a co-author of the paper, discovered the first worm on the beach at Blue Anchor in May 2020. Jawbone, Ruby was 11 years old at the time.
The two contacted Lomax, who joined members of the Reynolds family in a search for more pieces. Paul de la Salle, an expert at the Jurassic Museum of Marine Life in Dorset, also joined the hunt when he discovered a piece of what appeared to be a new ichthyosaur species on a beach in Somerset in 2016 Jawbone. Lomax and colleagues then studied the specimen.
When the team pieced together the fragments of the new fossil, they discovered that it belonged to the same species as the specimen found by De La Salle.
In both cases, the fossil bone was a suprathorn—a long, curved structure located on top and behind the lower jaw.
“When my team described the first sample in 2018, it showed unusual characteristics that suggested it might represent something new,” Lomax said. “However, we didn’t give it a name because it didn’t Complete and partially eroded.
“Having two examples of the same bone with the same unique characteristics from the same geological time zone supports our identification of something new, especially considering that these two bones appeared about 13 million years before their nearest geological relative had a name. Years,” he added.
Dr Nick Fraser, a palaeontologist at National Museums Scotland who was not involved in the study, said the identification of the bone as part of an ichthyosaur jaw was very convincing.
“This suggests that its former owner was a massive beast, possibly one of the largest marine reptiles ever known,” he said.
But Fraser said it was questionable whether the creature should be designated a new species. “To me, it’s a little too incomplete,” he said.
