The remains of a monstrous, 33-foot-long (10 meters) "sea dragon" that swam in the seas when dinosaurs were alive some 180 million years ago have been unearthed on a nature reserve in England. The behemoth is the biggest and most complete fossil of its kind ever discovered in the U.K.
"It is a truly unprecedented discovery and one of the greatest finds in British palaeontological history," excavation leader Dean Lomax, a paleontologist and visiting scientist at the University of Manchester.
Ichthyosaurs are an extinct order, or 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, in the late Cretaceous period. They had long snouts and looked similar to modern-day dolphins.
The newly discovered fossil belonged to a large species of ichthyosaur called Temnodontosaurus trigonodon — the first time this species has appeared in the U.K.
imtop. valuable member
