A giant ichthyosaur has been discovered across the canal

On May 28, 2020, on a beach at the mouth of the River Severn in western England, two amateur paleontologists found a fossil placed on a large pebble by a stranger. Nearby, they found another, better-preserved fragment that resembled a piece of an ichthyosaur jaw that had been discovered in the same coastal area a few years earlier. To their knowledge, paleontologist Dean Lomax (University of Bristol) and his colleagues were able to recover other elements from this lower jaw, which are better preserved than those they had previously described. In an article Published in One plus April 17They estimate the size of this 202-million-year-old carnivorous marine reptile at about 25 metres, making it the largest ever, and propose to “create” a new species called Ichthyotitan severensis. It exceeds 21 meters more than its Canadian cousin Schonisaurus sikanensisThey flourished on the eve of the mass extinction after which the number of surviving ichthyosaurs became smaller. These marine reptiles disappeared forever 94 million years ago, after 150 million years of dominating the oceans.