In a unique discovery, the remains of an enormous "Sea dragon" were found in a nature reserve in England, with a length of 10 meters, and it is believed that it was swimming in the seas when dinosaurs were alive about 180 million years ago. The giant is the largest and most complete fossil of its kind ever discovered in the United Kingdom, according to a report published on Live Science on January 11.

Extinct ichthyosaurs

The newly discovered fossil belongs to a huge ichthyosaur called Temnodontosaurus trigonodon. Leicestershire and Rutland Wildlife Trust - ichthyosaurs at Rutland Water Nature Reserve in the East Midlands January 2021, according to a press release posted on the Rutland Wildlife Service website Jan. 10.

Ichthyosaurs are an extinct order of marine reptiles that existed in the Triassic period about 250 million years ago, and disappeared from the fossil record 90 million years ago, in the late Cretaceous period, and they had a long nose similar to dolphins in modern times.

An unprecedented discovery

Although many of these ichthyosaurs have been found in the UK, none of them were as large as the current find.

In the press release, "This is a truly unprecedented discovery, and one of the greatest in the history of British paleontology," says Dean Lomax, a University of Manchester-associated paleontologist and excavation team leader.

Davis was walking across a dry lake with Paul Trevor, who also works for the Rutland Department of the Preserve, when he saw what appeared to be pottery channels jutting out of the mud, and Trevor noticed that they resembled the dorsal vertebrae. On the skeletons of whales and dolphins while working on the Hebrides island chain off northwest Scotland.

Researchers saw what might be pottery channels resembling dorsal vertebrae (Leicestershire and Rutland Wildlife Trust)

"We followed what looked like a spine for sure," Davis said, "and Paul [Trevor] discovered something else next to it which could be a jawbone... and we couldn't believe it."

Archaeologists excavated the fossil between August and September 2021, and the discovery was shown in a British television series called "Digging for Britain", which was broadcast in the United Kingdom last Tuesday, January 11.

However, archaeologists are still studying and preserving the ichthyosaur, and scientific papers on the discovery will be published in the future, although no time frame has been set for this.