Dr. Dean Lomax

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

They've got a whole bunch of pipes on 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 photos of them.

And I said, whoa, that's an ichthyosaur.

Now, of course, we didn't know how complete it 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.

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.

Wow.

And in fact, you've brought a piece of it with you today.

I have indeed, yeah.

Let me carefully unwrap this.

So this is a dorsal vertebra, and it's one of the largest.