"I was studying what looked like stones or ridges in the mud and I said: This seems a bit organic, a little different, and we found something that looked like a jaw." The Gardener Joe Davis worked on the maintenance of the Rutland Water Nature Reserve, in the United Kingdom, last February when he gave with a historical discovery. "I called the County and I said, 'I think I've found a dinosaur'. They answered me: 'We do not have a department of dinosaurs'".
Finally, it turned out not to be a dinosaur, but one of his contemporaries. Davis had discovered a gigantic marine predator 10 meters long called ichtiosaur. They lived between 250 and 90 million years ago and breathed, like the dolphins. They could reach 25 meters long.
Discovered the discovery, the paleontologists arrived, with Dr. Dean Lomax, from the University of Manchester, to the head. For him, this ictiosaur is "a truly unprecedented discovery and one of the biggest findings in British paleontological history."
"Usually, we think of ichtiosaurs and other marine reptiles discovered along the Jurassic coast in Dorset or the Yorkshire coast, where many of them are exposed by the erosion of the cliffs," explains to the BBC. "Here, inside, it is very unusual." Rutland is almost 50 km from the coast, but 200 million years ago was covered with water.
"Many people thought they were teasing them when I counted that I had found a marine reptile while I worked," Davis jokes, who will star in a BBC program about the find. "Many will not believe it until they see it on television."
Date Of Update: 10 January 2022, 17:03
