The father-daughter duo certainly did not expect such a find during their search for fossils. In the mouth of the River Severn they came across the remains of a huge marine reptile. It is probably the largest marine reptile to ever swim in the sea.
“Please welcome Ichthyotitan severnensis, a giant ichthyosaur from the Recent Triassic of the United Kingdom,” dinosaur expert Deam Lomax of the University of Manchester wrote on X (formerly Twitter). The entire animal may have been over 25 meters long, as he describes in the magazine ‘PLOS One’. The lower jawbones alone were probably more than two meters long.
Bone discovery brought back memories
The jawbone fragments were found in 2020 by Ruby Reynolds, then aged 11, who was looking for fossils on Blue Anchor beach in Somerset with her father Justin. The two acknowledged that the bones were similar to another find described in 2018.
Eleven-year-old became a scientist
This impressed ichthyosaur expert Lomax so much that he invited her to join the research team that would describe the find. Ruby is now a published scientist, they said. Not only did she find a giant prehistoric reptile, she also helped name it, Lomax said. The technical name is now Ichthyotitan severnensis, which can be translated as “giant Severn fish lizard”.
The discovery set researchers on a crucial path
The lower jaw bone found by father and daughter Reynolds is more complete and better preserved than the bone described in 2018. He confirmed some unique features of the bone fragments found for the first time, the location of which is about six miles from Blue Anchor.
“It is quite remarkable that giant ichthyosaurs the size of blue whales swam in the oceans around the UK during the Triassic,” says Lomax. The Triassic is the oldest period of the Mesozoic; it started about 252 million years ago and ended about 201 million years ago.
Reptile of gigantic proportions
Reconstruction of the fragments showed that the lower jaw bone was approximately 2.3 meters long. The authors of the study compared the bone, among other things, with a lower jaw bone from the ichthyosaur species Besanosaurus leptorhynchus, which was about 5.4 meters long. The distinguishing features of the remains of Ichthyotitan severnensis were about five times further apart than the comparable bones of Besanosaurus, so the scientists assume that the body length was five times greater.
“It is worth noting, however, that this is based on fragmentary remains and therefore more complete specimens are needed to confirm the gigantic size,” they write.
Height might even be trumped
“These jawbones provide a tantalizing clue that a complete skull or skeleton of one of these giants will one day be found,” Lomax said. The length of 25 meters could possibly even be exceeded: Examination of the bone tissue by study co-author Marcello Perillo of the University of Bonn showed that the ichthyosaur from Blue Anchor Beach was probably not yet fully grown.
If the data is confirmed, Ichthyotitan severnensis would not only be the largest ichthyosaur species yet discovered, but also the youngest: the fossils come from a rock formation that is about 202 million years old – 13 million years less than previously known giant ichthyosaurs.
Dinosaurs were victims of mass extinction
201 million years ago, at the end of the Triassic, the fifth largest mass extinction in Earth’s history occurred, probably killing all the large ichthyosaurs. After that, the marine reptiles never reached a comparable size again. About 93 million years ago they disappeared completely.
Source: Krone
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