Ten meters in length and a one-ton skull are the dimensions of an ichthyosaur fossil found by British researchers in an East Midlands reservoir. The British News Agency (PA) reported on Monday (10.01.2022) that it is the largest and most complete fossil of this type ever discovered in Great Britain.
It was a worker at Rutland Water Nature Reserve in England who accidentally digged the hole of a huge ‘sea dragon’ (Ichthyosaur), as revealed by the British public BBC.
And Joe Davis explained to the aforementioned channel, which will broadcast tomorrow a program dedicated to the discovery, that he initially called the local council to tell them that he had found a “dinosaur” while doing his work in February last year.
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Finally, what he saw was not a dinosaur, but the fossilized remains of a huge marine predator, called an ichthyosaur, 10 meters long, and the largest specimen ever found in the UK.
“I looked at what looked like stones or bumps in the mud, and I thought it was something organic, a little different. Then I saw something that looked like jaws,” Davis told the BBC.
The skeleton of an ichthyosaur was found in the Rutland Nature Reserve.
After inviting the man to City Hall, a team of paleontologists traveled to the area, concluding that the fossil belonged to an ichthyosaur, a species that could be up to 25 meters long and live between 250 and 90 million years.
Search “unprecedented”
Dean Lomax, a paleontologist at the University of Manchester, called the find “truly unprecedented” given its scale and described it as “one of the great discoveries in the history of British paleontology”.
It is ten meters long and the skull alone weighs a ton.
“We generally think that ichthyosaurs and other marine reptiles have been discovered on the Jurassic coast of Dorset or the Yorkshire coast, many of which are subject to cliff erosion. This is very rare inland,” the expert said. channel.
Rutland is located about 50 kilometers from the coast, although 200 million years ago the area was covered with water.
FEW (EFE, dpa)
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