In Great Britain, found a huge "sea dragon"

The remains of a ten-meter marine reptile discovered near Rutland Water, England's largest reservoir. The skeleton of an ichthyosaur was hidden under Jurassic clays.

The fossil is the largest and best-preserved reptile ever found in the United Kingdom. It was discovered by accident: an employee of the Rutland Water Nature Reserve, Joe Davis, was engaged in landscaping a reservoir in February 2021, but suddenly noticed a strange object sticking out of the mud.

At first, Davis thought it was a dinosaur, and reported this to the county council. In August-September, scientists carried out excavations, but the fact that this is not a dinosaur, but a "sea dragon" Temnodontosaurus trigonodon, was told only now.

The skull of an ichthyosaur is about the size of a piano, and the total mass of fossil remains is about a ton. Dr. Dean Lomax, who directed the excavation, noted"This is truly an unprecedented discovery and one of the greatest discoveries in the history of British paleontology."

To describe the find as accurately as possible, the scientists took thousands of photographs and used the method of photogrammetry. Based on the data obtained, they created a 3D model of an ichthyosaur.

The first such reptiles in Great Britain at the beginning of the 19th century discovered paleontologist Mary Anning. Ichthyosaurs inhabited the oceans of the Earth about 250 million years ago, but about 90 million years ago, the animals became extinct.

The ichthyosaurs are believed to have evolved from a group of terrestrial reptiles that returned to the sea. They resemble dolphins or whales, but this is just an example of convergent evolution: when similar traits develop in distantly related species in order to adapt to the same conditions.