Africa-Press – South-Africa. The fossilized remains discovered by a father-daughter duo on England’s coast a few years ago apparently belonged to a giant prehistoric creature that dwelled in Earth’s oceans millions of years ago.
According to local media reports, Justin Reynolds and his daughter Ruby found the huge, over 2 meters long remains of the creature’s jawbone, on a beach in Somerset back in 2020.
The father-daughter duo then enlisted the help of Dr Dean Lomax, a palaeontologist at The University of Manchester, and a fossil collector named Paul de la Salle who previously found a giant jawbone on the coast of Somerset in 2016, and continued the search.
After the final fragment of the jawbone was discovered by the end of 2022, a team of researchers led by Dr. Lomax concluded that the fossil belonged to a new species of giant ichthyosaur which, as Sky News puts it, would have been roughly the size of a blue whale.
The over 25-meters long creature, dubbed Ichthyotitan severnensis, was dated to a period over 200 million years ago.
“I was amazed by the find. In 2018, my team including Paul de la Salle studied and described Paul’s giant jawbone and we had hoped that one day another would come to light,” Dr. Lomax said as quoted by the media outlet. “This new specimen is more complete, better preserved, and shows that we now have two of these giant bones – called a surangular – that have a unique shape and structure.”
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