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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.
The creature lived around 202 million years ago alongside the dinosaurs.
Its fossilised jawbone was found in 2016 by a fossil hunter on a Somerset beach. In 2020 a father and daughter found a second, very similar jawbone.
Experts now say the fossils are from two giant ichthyosaur reptiles, which could have been 25m long.
That is bigger than a huge pliosaur whose skull was found embedded in Dorset cliffs and was in the David Attenborough documentary the Giant Sea Monster.
“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.
But he says more evidence, like a complete skull and skeleton, is needed to confirm the exact size of the creature because just a few fragments have been found so far.
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. He has collected fossils for 25
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