Scientists named a new kind of ichthyosaur with the help of a fossil-hunting girl and her father. The extinct marine reptile may have been one of the largest animals ever.
In 2020, 11-year-old Ruby Reynolds and her father, Justin, visited Blue Anchor Beach near Somerset, England. The experienced fossil hunters found pieces of bone. They took them home and started researching.
In 2016, Paul de la Salle had found similar bones in the same region. Scientists hypothesized that his find could be part of a jawbone from a giant ichthyosaur. The Reynoldses contacted experts, suspecting their discovery could be another specimen from the same species.
With two specimens, researchers named the creature Ichthyotitan severnensis and estimate that it was between 72 and 85 feet long. (The blue whale, considered the largest living animal on Earth, can reach about 100 feet long.)
No one has found other pieces of an Ichthyotitan’s skeleton. But researchers think they know what it looked like based on other members of its family. Ichthyosaurs came in various sizes and shapes. They ate fish and other marine reptiles and gave birth to live young.
The bone Ruby and her dad found is called a surangular. It is a long, curved bone at the top of the lower jaw, just behind the teeth. Most vertebrates that aren’t mammals have this bone.
Researcher Jimmy Waldron says that Tyrannosaurus rex’s surangular was about one and a half feet long. But the surangular Ruby and her father found stretched more than six feet! That helps show how truly enormous this creature was.
Colossal Snake Found
An ancient snake in India might have been longer than a school bus and weighed a literal ton.
People found pieces of the snake’s backbone in Kutch, Gujarat, western India. How did they estimate its size? Researchers compared the 27 fossilized vertebrae to skeletons of living snakes. They think Vasuki indicus stretched between 36 feet to 50 feet long! The largest living snake today is Asia’s reticulated python. It can reach 33 feet.
Why did God make this species so big? Only He knows for sure. Scientists suggest that warmer temperatures at the time the snakes lived contributed. “These snakes are giant cold-blooded animals,” says Jason Head, a Cambridge University paleontologist. “A snake requires higher temperatures” to grow to large sizes. Maybe the species died out when cooler temperatures came.
Still, the researchers told CNN that there could be other factors contributing to the large size, such as a habitat with plenty of food or lack of predators.
Why? God made many fascinating animals. Today, scientists hypothesize and make their best guesses about extinct creatures—but we may never know exactly what these creatures were like.
