<
https://theconversation.com/how-a-teenager-helped-identify-a-new-species-of-giant-marine-reptile-228036>
"It may be difficult to imagine, but the county of Somerset in south-west
England was once home to what may have been the largest marine reptiles that
ever lived, my team’s new study reveals.
A strange and enormous jawbone was discovered on the English coastline eight
years ago, but my team was hesitant to identify it as a new species until more
specimens came to light. Now, with the discovery of a second giant jawbone
several years later, we have named a new species of ichthyosaur, an ancient
marine reptile.
In 2016, prolific fossil hunter Paul de la Salle unearthed a giant jawbone on
the beach at Lilstock in Somerset. It was an incomplete bone from the back of
the animal’s lower jaw. My team, including De la Salle, studied this discovery
and published our findings in 2018 in the journal
PLOS One.
His find was important because it was recovered from roughly 202
million-year-old rocks, was very large (1 metre long but incomplete), and
clearly belonged to a new species of giant ichthyosaur. The jawbone (called a
surangular) had an unusual shape and structure. But we refrained from giving
the discovery a name, in the hope that more fossil remains would come along in
the future.
Enter a second, more complete and better-preserved specimen, this time
representing a right surangular from another individual.
This latest find was made just six miles along the coast at Blue Anchor in
2020. It was found by fossil-hunting father and daughter Justin and Ruby
Reynolds (Ruby was then 11). They contacted me almost immediately upon finding
it. Over the next few years, along with De la Salle and several of our family
members, we collected more fossil fragments, with the last piece found in
October 2022.
As we began to piece together different sections of the same jawbone, we
estimated that the entire bone would have been just over 2 metres long. The
preservation and fine detail provided new information that also helped us to
better reinterpret De la Salle’s original bone."
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
