It’s the biggest and most complete fossil of its kind ever discovered in the U.K.
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The remains of a monstrous, 33-foot-long (10 meters) “sea dragon” that swam in the seas when dinosaurs were alive some 180 million years ago have been unearthed on a nature reserve in England.
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The behemoth is the biggest and most complete fossil of its kind ever discovered in the U.K.
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“It is a truly unprecedented discovery and one of the greatest finds in British palaeontological history,”
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excavation leader Dean Lomax, a paleontologist and visiting scientist at the University of Manchester, said in a statement.
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Though many such ichthyosaurs have been found in the U.K., none have been as large as the current discovery.
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Ichthyosaurs are an extinct order, or large group, of marine reptiles that evolved in the Triassic period about 250 million years ago
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and disappeared from the fossil record 90 million years ago, in the late Cretaceous period.
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They had long snouts and looked similar to modern-day dolphins.
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The newly discovered fossil belonged to a large species of ichthyosaur called Temnodontosaurus trigonodon the first time this species has appeared in the U.K. Joe Davis,
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a conservation team leader for the Leicestershire and Rutland Wildlife Trust, found the ichthyosaur on the Rutland Water Nature Reserve in the East Midlands in January 2021, according to the statement.
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Davis was walking across a drained lagoon with Paul Trevor, who also works on the reserve for the trust,
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when he saw what appeared to be clay pipes sticking out of the mud and remarked to Trevor that they looked like vertebrae.
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Davis was familiar with sea creature bones, having previously found whale and dolphin skeletons while working on the Hebrides, a series of islands off northwest Scotland.
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“We followed what indisputably looked like a spine and Paul Trevor discovered something further along that could have been a jawbone,” Davis said. “We couldn’t quite believe it.”
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Archaeologists excavated the fossil between August and September in 2021.
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The discovery will be featured on a British television series called “Digging for Britain,” which airs in the U.K. on Tuesday (Jan. 11) on BBC Two.
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Archaeologists are still studying and conserving the ichthyosaur fossil and scientific papers about the discovery will be published in the future, according to the statement, though no timeframe was given.
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