Dean Lomax

a father and daughter fossil hunting pair, Justin and Ruby Reynolds.

And Ruby, I should say as well, she was only 11 years old at the time, and she and her dad found some more fragments of what turned out to be yet another giant serangula bone, this time much more complete, but showing exactly the same features as Paul's.

This time we had two specimens from a very rare...

geological unit in the time called the lake triassic about 205 ish million years old and so this time i invited paul justin and ruby and other people to be part of my team and we described them as a new gigantic ichthyosaur that we named ichthyotitan in 2024 and this beastie was genuinely a titan you're looking at easily 26 meters long animal

I mean, so it's really a contender for the largest animal that ever lived.

Absolutely, yeah.

It's up there as a contender.

And we included some other giant fragments in there that may even belong to something in the 30, 40 metre range.

And we're hoping for more material like that to come forward in the future.

There is, yeah.

So Justin and Ruby actually joined me on a major expedition.

They came out with their family to British Columbia in Canada to film for this big documentary and IMAX film that's coming out even later this year, early next year.

And that's kind of all focused around Ichthyotitan and giant ichthyosaurs, but there are some new discoveries on the horizon.

Yeah, it is massive.

And this thing, it was found in January 2021 by a chap called Joe Davis.

He works for the Rutland Water Nature Reserve and he was fixing one of the lagoons.

They've got a whole bunch of pipes in the lagoons and they literally pulled the plug on the lagoon.

lowered the water levels and whilst him and another colleague Paul were walking along they just happened to spot this string of vertebrae and he said oh I wonder what that is and he snapped some pictures and Paul said no no it's an old pipe that leave it it's nothing and he still teases him to this day but a day later I received the the photos of them and I said well that's an ichthyosaur now of course we didn't know how complete was going to be

I led an excavation in the summer of 2021 and we had the entire animal from the very tip of the snout to the end of the tail, 10 meter long early Jurassic giant.

And it's the most complete prehistoric reptile ever found in Britain, but also the most complete of that time interval around the world of roughly 180 million years ago.