An English kid and her father discovered the fossilized jawbone of a massive marine reptile on a Somerset, England beach. The reptile lived around 202 million years ago and was likely one of the biggest creatures.
Researchers claimed on Wednesday that the bone, termed a surangular, was from an ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. The researchers determined that the Triassic Period species, which they called Ichthyotitan severnensis, was 72 to 85 feet (22 to 26 meters) long based on its measurements compared to those of similarly sized ichthyosaurs.
If that’s the case, it would be on par with the biggest baleen whales in the world and perhaps the largest marine reptile known to man. The blue whale, often recognized as the biggest mammal in Earth’s history, may grow to about 100 feet (30 meters).
While dinosaurs were the dominant terrestrial animals, marine reptiles controlled the seas. Ichthyosaurs, which developed from terrestrial predecessors and flourished for around 160 million years until dying about 90 million years ago, came in diverse sizes and forms, consuming fish, squid cousins, and other marine reptiles and giving birth to live young.
Ruby and her father Justin Reynolds discovered a jawbone from an Ichthyotitan in 2020 in Blue Anchor, Somerset, while another person discovered a second individual’s jawbone in 2016 at Lilstock, also along the Somerset coast. That’s all the information we have about it.
Lead author of the study published in the journal PLOS ONE, paleontologist Dean Lomax of the Universities of Manchester and Bristol, expressed his astonishment at the idea that enormous ichthyosaurs, similar to blue whales, were swimming in the oceans during the Triassic Period, when dinosaurs were on land in the area that is now the United Kingdom.
Ruby Reynolds, who is now fifteen years old, was eleven years old when she and her father discovered a fragment of the surangular while fossil searching on the seashore. Ruby proceeded to investigate the area and discovered a second piece – considerably bigger than the first – half buried in a mud slope. More pieces of the bone were found when they consulted ichthyosaur specialist Lomax.
Some have drawn parallels between Ruby Reynolds and Mary Anning, a British paleontologist and fossil finder who, among her many accomplishments, found ichthyosaur fossils at the tender age of twelve, in the nineteenth century.
“I believe Mary Anning was an excellent paleontologist and it’s fantastic to be compared to her,” Ruby Reynolds remarked.
“It has been an incredible, instructive and exciting experience to collaborate with these specialists, and we are happy to be part of the team and co-authors of a scientific study which identifies a new species and genus,” Justin Reynolds said.
Fossil collector Paul de la Salle unearthed the 2016 bones now linked to Ichthyotitan.
Ichthyotitan’s sheer size was awe-inspiring.
“Discoveries like these produce great moments when we get humbled at our size and position in the planet. To learn that an animal of this magnitude once swam our oceans, felt the same warmth of the sun, and breathed our air, and then vanished gives us an opportunity to see how important each species is to the fragile-yet-resilient fabric of life,” Florida-based paleontologist and study co-author Jimmy Waldron said.
Ichthyotitan was a member of a family of giant ichthyosaurs called shastasauridae, and lived 13 million years later than any of the others known to date, suggesting these behemoths survived until a global mass extinction event that doomed numerous types of animals about 201 million years ago at the end of the Triassic.
No fossils of the remainder of Ichthyotitan’s skeleton have been found, but the researchers have been able to infer its look based on other members of its family like Shonisaurus from British Columbia, Canada.
The surangular is a long, curved bone at the top of the lower jaw, directly below the teeth, found in practically every vertebrate alive or extinct, except from mammals. Muscles linked to this bone create biting force.
“In T. rex, the surangular measures over half a meter (1-1/2 feet) in length. The surangular Ruby and her father uncovered extended more than two meters (7 feet). This translates to not just the scale of how incredibly massive the animal was, but provides us a clue that it had a lot of boost behind its bite,” said Waldron, who developed the Dinosaurs Will Always Be Awesome mobile dinosaur exhibit.