Somerset's giant sea monster! Huge ichthyosaur twice the size of a London bus ... trends now
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It's best known for Glastonbury, cider and cheddar.
But Somerset now has a new claim to fame – as its coastline was once home to the largest species of marine reptile ever to be discovered.
Experts have revealed a huge ichthyosaur, two times the size of a bus, swam in the sea off Somerset 200 million years ago.
Archaeologists from the University of Bristol and the University of Manchester have spent the last few years piecing together fragments of a jawbone unearthed in the Westbury Mudstone Formation.
The new bone was similar in size and shape to another jawbone collected from the same rock formation just a few miles away.
It's best known for Glastonbury, cider and cheddar. But Somerset now has a new claim to fame – as its coastline was once home to the largest species of marine reptile ever to be discovered
Archaeologists from the University of Bristol and the University of Manchester have spent the last few years piecing together fragments of a jawbone unearthed in the Westbury Mudstone Formation
Together, they now believe these two jawbones belong to a previously undescribed species of ichthyosaur – a group of massive, ocean-dwelling reptiles from the age of the dinosaurs.
Based on the length of these bones, the new species, named Ichthyotitan severnensis, may have been a whopping 25 meters (82 feet) long – twice the length of a London bus.
Ichthyosaurs, many of which looked like modern-day dolphins, first evolved during the early Triassic period around 250 million years ago.
They are distant relatives of lizards and snakes and were able to move through the water at very high speeds.
They preyed on a range of animals, such as octopus, squid and cuttlefish, with the long, thin jaws which contained numerous sharp teeth.
Within a few million years, some had evolved to reach at least 15 meters (49 feet) long, and by the Late Triassic the largest
