When the then twelve-year-old Mary Anning discovered the first complete ichthyosaur skeleton in south-west England not far from her hometown Lyme Regis in 1811, most of the experts at the time believed that it must be the remains of a gigantic crocodile. Anning, who died in 1847, later became famous as a fossil collector. She is considered to be one of the very first paleontologists. During her lifetime at the beginning of the 1840s, the English physician and anatomist Richard Owen, who, along with Charles Darwin, is counted among the most important naturalists of his time, first coined the word "dinosaur". Even then, he included the unscientific prehistoric reptile, also known as ichthyosaur, that Mary Anning had found in his descriptions.
Ichthyosaur skeletons have now been found in thousands and in many places around the world, including in the foreland of the Swabian Alb near the small community of Holzmaden. But few are anywhere near the size of the fossil uncovered last year in a nature reserve in County Rutland in Leicestershire, England, east of Birmingham. At a good ten meters in length, it is not only the largest, it is also the most complete skeleton of an ichthyosaur ever discovered in the United Kingdom. And there is also the only one of the species "Temnodontosaurus trigonodon". The head of the excavation, Dean Lomax of the University of Manchester, speaks of one of the most important finds in the paleontological history of Great Britain.
The skeleton was discovered by Joe Davis in February 2021. The employee of the Rutland Water Nature Reserve wanted to create a drainage in the swampy wetland when he came across the ichthyosaur, which is estimated to be around 180 million years old. According to a statement from the nature reserve, the fossilized, roughly two-meter-long skull of the animal alone should weigh almost a ton. Ichthyosaurs lived in the Mesozoic Era. They appeared around 250 million years ago and died out 93 million years ago - around 30 million years before the so-called Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction, which is held responsible for the disappearance of the dinosaurs, among other things. Why the fish lizards, of which around 80 different species are known, became extinct is unclear.
The ichthyosaurs, which belong to the land vertebrates, lived exclusively in water.
Depending on the species, they could be between one and up to 20 meters long.
A bone fragment, part of the lower jaw of a gigantic fish lizard, found in Somerset, England, caused a stir in 2016.
The animal, named after the place where it was found, the Lilstock ichthyosaur, could have been calculated to have a total length of 25 meters and would have been almost as big as a blue whale.