Scientists say a fossilised jawbone found in Somerset may be from one of the biggest sea creatures...
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.
Its fossilised jawbone was found in 2016 by a fossil hunter on a beach in Somerset, UK. In 2020 a father and daughter found another similar jawbone.
"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.
The giant ichthyosaur died out in a mass extinction and the ichthyosaurs that lived after that never reached the enormous size again, he said.
The first glimpse of the creature came in 2016 when fossil hunter Paul de la Salle was scouring Somerset beaches.
Tony Jolliffe BBC. Paul de la Salle and his wife Carol go fossil hunting together.
Trawling the beach with his wife Carol, he saw what turned out to be the find of a lifetime - the first known jawbone of this giant, marine reptile.
Dean co-wrote the latest scientific paper with Ruby Reynolds - one day he says the specimen she found may even be named Ruby.The specimen Paul found has been in his garage for three years while the team analysed it.
"I will be a bit sad to say cheerio. I've come to know it and studied it in such intense detail. But it's also a relief because I won't have to worry about it so much," says Paul.Dean says the discovery highlights how important amateur fossil collectors are.
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