It was 33 feet (10 meters) long when it lived 180 million years ago. The image is courtesy of Anglian Water.
A nature reserve in England has unearthed the remains of a giant sea dragon that swam in the seas 180 million years ago. The biggest and most complete fossil of its kind has been discovered in the U.K.
The excavation leader said that it was one of the greatest finds in British palaeontological history.
The current discovery is the largest of its kind in the U.K.
There are 10 fossils unearthed in 2021.
The Ichthyosaurs, a large group of marine reptiles that evolved in the Triassic period about 250 million years ago and disappeared from the fossil record 90 million years ago, are an extinct order. They had long snouts and looked like dolphins.
The first fossils of a large species of reptile, called the Temnodontosaurus trigonodon, have been found in the U.K.
When he saw the clay pipes sticking out of the mud, Davis remarked to Paul that they looked like vertebrae. While working on the Hebrides, Davis found whale and dolphin skeletons, and he was familiar with sea creature bones.
"We followed something that looked like a spine and found something further along that could have been a jawbone," Davis said. We couldn't believe it.
The fossil was excavated between August and September. The discovery will be shown on a British television series called "Digging for Britain" on Tuesday.
The statement did not say when the papers about the discovery would be published.
Live Science published the original article.
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