Scientists have identified what was probably the largest marine reptile ever to swim in the seas – a creature longer than two, nose-to-nose buses. The creature lived around 202 million years ago alongside the dinosaurs. Its fossilised jawbone was found in 2016 by a fossil hunter on a beach in Somerset, UK. In 2020, another similar jawbone was found by a father and daughter. Experts now say the fossils are from two giant ichthyosaur reptiles, which could have been 25m long.
“Based on the size of the jawbones – one of them over a meter long and the other two metres long – we can work out that the entire animal would have been about 25m long, about as long as a blue whale,” according to Dr. Dean Lomax, a palaeontologist at the University of Bristol, who wrote the scientific paper published on Wednesday. However, more evidence, such as a complete skull and skeleton, is needed to confirm the exact size of the creature.
The giant ichthyosaur died out in a mass extinction, and the ichthy