How a teenager helped identify a new species of giant marine reptile
Retrieved on:
Thursday, April 18, 2024
A strange and enormous jawbone was discovered on the English coastline eight years ago, but my team was hesitant to identify it as a new species until more specimens came to light.
Key Points:
- A strange and enormous jawbone was discovered on the English coastline eight years ago, but my team was hesitant to identify it as a new species until more specimens came to light.
- Now, with the discovery of a second giant jawbone several years later, we have named a new species of ichthyosaur, an ancient marine reptile.
- In 2016, prolific fossil hunter Paul de la Salle, unearthed a giant jawbone on the beach at Lilstock in Somerset.
- My team, including De la Salle, studied this discovery and published our findings in 2018 in the journal PLOS One.
- The preservation and fine detail provided new information that also helped us to better reinterpret De la Salle’s original bone.
- We therefore erected a new genus (taxonomic rank) and species of giant ichthyosaur that we called Ichthyotitan severnensis, meaning “giant fish lizard of the Severn”.
Blue whale-sized giants
- Using a basic formula called a simple scaling factor, we can estimate that our ichthyosaur was up to 26 metres long, about the size of a blue whale.
- Comparisons with the same bone in other ichthyosaurs suggests that Ichthyotitan was between 20 and 26 metres in length.
- We have to be careful with such estimations due to differences among species, such as those with long or short snouts.
- At 202 million years old, the fossils narrowly predate a global extinction event that eradicated these giants – and marine reptiles would never reach such a size again.
Anyone can make a contribution
- I asked them whether they would like to join my team to study this fossil and they agreed.
- Ruby Reynolds is now a published scientist who not only found but also helped to name a gigantic prehistoric reptile.
- Palaeontology is one of those sciences where anybody can make a significant contribution.
Dean Lomax worked with Paul de la Salle, Marcello Perillo, Justin and Ruby Reynolds and Jimmy Waldron of the Dinosaurs Will Always Be Awesome Museum on the referenced research. He dedicates the work to Paul de la Salle who found the first surangular in 2016.