“A lot of people tend to go back to the old days and call them sea dragons.”įrom the photos, Dr. “They had these big eyes, big teeth,” he said. They disappeared about 90 million years ago and overlapped with dinosaurs, he said. Lomax, who said that they were apex predators that likely feasted on other ichthyosaurs, fish, another reptile known as a plesiosaur and ammonites, a kind of mollusk.

Ichthyosaurs, fish-shaped marine reptiles that resemble whales and dolphins, first appeared about 250 million years ago, according to Dr. Lomax, the head of the excavation project, said on Monday.

“I immediately recognized them as ichthyosaur vertebrae,” Dr. Lomax, a paleontologist specializing in the study of ichthyosaurs. Davis, 48, took photographs of the fossil and contacted the Rutland County Council, which connected him with a geology curator at the University of Leicester, who referred him to Dean R. That’s when alarm bells started to ring.” “I realized it might be something from the dinosaur era. “We sort of looked at it and scratched our heads,” Mr. Joe Davis, a conservation team leader at Leicestershire and Rutland Wildlife Trust, said on Monday that he first encountered the fossil last February as he plodded through the mud in his waders with a colleague. The fossil was found in 2021 at the Rutland Water Nature Reserve in England’s East Midlands, a landlocked reservoir about 160 kilometers (100 miles) north of London that is known for attracting water fowl and other birds. It might never have been unearthed if the lagoon hadn’t been drained as part of a landscaping project. The skeleton is from the early Jurassic Period about 180 million years ago and measures about 10 meters (more than 30 feet), they said. They said it was also one of the largest and most complete skeletons of an ichthyosaur (pronounced IK-thee-uh-sor) found anywhere in the world. This was not just any old find: The remains of the sea creature, an ichthyosaur, were the largest ever discovered of that type in Britain, those involved in a now-complete excavation project announced on Monday. Only recently had the fossilized remains been found, a throwback to when dinosaurs ruled the Earth and gigantic marine reptiles, colloquially referred to as “sea dragons,” marauded the oceans. Anyone can read what you share.Īt the bottom of a lagoon at a nature reserve in England, a secret lay dormant for millenniums, hidden by mud, water and ice. The fossilized remains of the marine reptile, often referred to as a “sea dragon” and believed to be 180 million years old, were discovered at a nature reserve.Īs a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month.

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