Scare on the beach: it's “the largest sea creature ever seen”
In 2020, a father and his daughter were walking quietly along the beach in Somerset, England, when they discovered an impressive creature…
Justin Reynolds and his daughter Ruby dug up a gigantic fossil; the jaw of the largest marine reptile ever identified. They entrusted the discovery to the paleontologist at the University of Manchester, Dean Lomax.
“According to a study published on April 17, a similar fossil had already been discovered by collector Paul de la Salle in 2016, on this same British coast,” reports Demotivateur. Two fossils belong to a marine reptile called an “ichthyosaur”, that lived on Earth 202 million years ago.
“It’s quite remarkable to imagine that gigantic ichthyosaurs, the size of a blue whale, were sailing the oceans at the time that dinosaurs roamed the land in what is now the United Kingdom, during the Triassic period,” says Dean Lomax.
The ichthyosaur rivals the largest mammals of our time, including the blue whale, considered the largest animal to have ever lived on earth. It is its size, up to 26 metres long, that sets the ichthyosaur apart from other creatures.
(MH with AsD - Source: Demotivateur - Illustration: Unsplash)
