It’s as the old adage goes: Live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse. That was certainly the case for one ancient marine reptile when, roughly 180 million years ago, it ceased swimming and promptly fossilized. Its skeletal remains, stretching over 32 feet in length, were excavated in the United Kingdom last year, according to a Monday statement from the University of Manchester. The fossil, replete with a skull weighing over 2,200 pounds, is the largest and most complete of its kind ever found in Britain. The ichthyosaur, a dolphin-like creature commonly known as a “Sea Dragon,” was discovered in January 2021. According to the release, conservation officials stumbled upon it during the routine draining and maintenance of a lagoon in the Rutland Water Nature Reserve. “In the world of British palaeontology, the discovery is like finding a complete Tyrannosaurus rex out in the Badlands of America, only this Jurassic giant was found in a nature reserve in Rutland, of all places!” a Manchester paleontologist and leader of the expedition said. “It is a truly unprecedented discovery and one of the greatest finds in British palaeontological history.”
