Strolling a familiar beach and stumbling upon a relic from the age of dinosaurs sounds like pure fantasy, yet that is exactly what happened on England’s west coast
burger iconlogosearch-iconLargest marine reptile ever known to exist was discovered by an 11-year-old girl04-21-2025Largest marine reptile ever known to exist was discovered by an 11-year-old girlEric RallsByEric RallsEarth.com staff writerStrolling a familiar beach and stumbling upon a relic from the age of dinosaurs sounds like pure fantasy, yet that is exactly what happened on England’s west coast.A stretch of shoreline below Somerset’s crumbling cliffs yielded a bone so large that it challenged everything we thought we knew about prehistoric marine reptiles.The fossil – a lower jaw more than 6½ feet long – promised a creature leagues beyond anything alive today. The find dated to around 202 million years ago, slotting it into the turbulent final chapter of the Triassic Period.At that time, much of what is now Britain lay beneath a warm, shallow sea patrolled by meat‑eating giants. Their reign ended in a mass extinction, leaving only scattered bones to whisper their stories – until now.Ruby and Ichthyotitan severnensisBack in late May 2020, 11‑year‑old Ruby Reynolds and her father, Justin, headed for the mudflats of Blue Anchor, looking for fossils
Justin spotted a four‑inch scrap of bone, “bigger than any piece of bone I’d ever found before,” he recalls.Ruby wandered on and unearthed a second fragment twice that size. “It was just sort of lying there,” she says. “I was just happy, really.” Their excitement would soon ripple far beyond the shoreline.Word reached paleontologist Dean Lomax, who holds posts at both the University of Bristol and the University of Manchester. He recognized echoes of another Somerset specimen lifted in 2016 by local collector Paul de la Salle
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