Girl, 11, Helps Discover Largest Ever Reptile

Ichthyotitan severnensis estimated at 82 feet long, with a 7-foot-long jawbone
By Arden Dier,  Newser Staff
Posted May 11, 2024 1:50 PM CDT
Girl, 11, Helps Discover Largest Ever Reptile
A depiction of an Ichthyotitan severnensis carcass on the beach.   (Sergey Krasovskiy, CC-BY 4.0)

It was the largest reptile to ever prowl Earth's oceans. At some 82 feet, this giant ichthyosaur would've been nearly as large as a blue whale, a marine mammal and the largest animal known to exist at any point in the planet's history. Yet the ichthyosaur, dubbed Ichthyotitan severnensis, largely went unnoticed until an 11-year-old girl and her father spotted a unique fossil during their stroll along a beach in southwest England during the height of the coronavirus pandemic in May 2020. At four inches long, the fossil, which someone appeared to have carried to the top of the beach, was "bigger than any piece of bone I'd ever found before," amateur fossil hunter Justin Reynolds tells NPR.

His daughter, Ruby, kept her eyes to the ground and soon came across an even larger and better preserved fossil. "It was just sort of lying there," half buried in mud, she tells NPR. The two fossils pointed to an unknown species of ichthyosaur, an order of large extinct marine reptiles. This species—described in a study published last month in PLOS One, of which the now 15-year-old Ruby is a co-author—lived some 202 million years ago, near the end of the Triassic Period. Lead study author Dean Lomax, a paleontologist at the universities of Bristol and Manchester, had previously seen only a hint of Ichthyotitan severnensis in fossils found by his friend Paul de la Salle, another amateur fossil collector credited with the discovery.

De la Salle's fossils, collected a short distance from the others in 2016, formed what Lomax identified as part of an ichthyosaur jawbone, per Discover. In a 2018 study, the pair noted the fossils "might represent the largest ichthyosaurs currently known." Two years later, Reynolds and Ruby reached out, claiming their fossils were a match. "They were quite right," Lomax tells NPR. More fossils were collected from Somerset's Blue Anchor Beach, allowing the identification of the species, whose complete lower jawbone would've been at least seven feet long, per Smithsonian. The reptile's estimated full size is extrapolated from it. But Lomax hopes that, after the latest discovery, "perhaps one day a complete skull or skeleton ... might be found," per a release. (More discoveries stories.)

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