In May 2020, Justin and Ruby Reynolds – a father and his then 11-year-old daughter – found the first pieces of bone together on the beach at Blue Anchor in Somerset (it’s practically a widening funnel mouth of the River Severn). Realizing that they had found an important fossil, they contacted ichthyosaur expert Dean Lomax, a well-known science popularizer.
It turned out that a similar, but more incomplete, bone remains had already been discovered in 2016 by a fellow researcher, Paul de la Salle. The finds that have just been found are pieces of the jaw of the fish lizard, just like the fossil found in 2016, but the current one is less incomplete and has survived in better condition.
Thanks to this, specialists already have two such bones that are part of the jaw. Reynolds remembered this earlier find thanks to the publication at the time, and since the bone found by his daughter was very similar to the one in the publication, it was for this reason that he thought of looking for the Lomaxes.
The researchers and the little girl with her dad (center) with the Ichtyotitan bones.
Source: Dr. Dean Lomax
Together with the researchers and several other family members, the Reynolds went back to the site to look for more pieces, and they were successful: they found more fragments of the same bone, the individual pieces could be fitted together perfectly, like a multi-million-year-old puzzle.
A legutolsó leletet 2022 októberében fedezték fel, Ruby Reynolds nemcsak a maradványok felkutatásában vett részt, hanem a tudományos leírásban is.
“Maybe the new Mary Anning will come out of her,” Dean Lomax admittedly said of the now 15-year-old teenager.
Jaw bone of Ichtyotitan
Source: PLOS One
Examination of the bones revealed that they belonged to a hitherto unknown fish lizard, i.e. a species new to science could be described, the name of which Ichthyotitan severnensis, i.e. it became the “Giant Fish Lizard of the Severn”. Analysis of the internal structure of the bone also revealed that the specimen was still growing when it died.
The animal lived at the end of the Triassic period, about 202 million years ago, when the endgame of these giants took place – the end-Triassic extinction wave swept away these large fish-lizards. The researchers hope that one day a complete skull may be found, from which we can get to know these titan-sized fish lizards even better.
The remains will soon be on display at the Bristol Museum, where the general public can view them.
