Sea dragon found in Rutland UK

The astonishing discovery of this jurassic era creature was headline news last week, and Mark Evans spoke to Harry Lewis to explain the significance of the dig...

Mark - I guess it all started in January last year. I had an email from a colleague of mine at The University of Leicester who had been sent some interesting pictures on an email, and they seemed to show some large bones sticking out of some mud. That's pretty much all we knew. Dean and I looked and we thought we knew what it was, but we weren't entirely sure. Because I live locally - I'm only about 25 minutes from where the thing was found - we decided that I'd go and have a look. I met up with a guy called Joe Davis who manages the nature reserve at Rutland Water. Rutland Water is the largest artificial lake in the country. Joe took us out to an island on a lagoon, which is part of the nature reserve at Rutland Water, and there he showed us what he'd found just on the edge of the water. It was very, very wet, very sloppy mud, but there's enough there to confirm what Dean and I had thought we could see in the photographs: that this was part of the skeleton of a large Icthyosaur.

Harry - On this preliminary survey that you had, how much of the bone do you need to see to get that idea that you know what this dig might comprise of?

Mark - With Icthyosaurs, the vertebrae are quite a distinctive shape: they're almost like hockey pucks. If you can see them at the right angle, depending how they're exposed, then they have distinctive articulations for the ribs. It was definitely a large Icthyosaur, but at that time we didn't know quite how big this thing was.

Harry - And is there a range in the size or length of these creatures?

Mark - The smallest ones were less than a metre and the largest we know from good remains is probably about 21 or so meters, something like that. But, also, there are isolated fragmentary remains which suggests that they might have got larger than that: 25/6/7 meters maybe, which is approaching the size of large living whales.

Harry - Mark, You better put us out of our misery. What actually is an Icthyosaur?

Mark - Well, Icthyosaurs are superficially fish, dolphin or shark shaped, marine reptiles. They lived in the Jurassic period, so between about 250 million years ago, and about 90 million years ago when they all became extinct. There is a common misconception that they're some kind of dinosaur, but they're not. They're unrelated to dinosaurs. They just happened to live at the same time as dinosaurs, but all Icthyosaurs lived in the sea as far as we can tell. They had a dorsal fin, most of them, like a shark, or whale, or dolphin. They had a tail fin, which was vertical, and they had two sets of flippers, so they had front flippers and hind flippers.

Harry - What happens now? What point are we at with this preservation? What does it mean going forward? What can we learn from it?

Mark - I guess the end point of the excavation was when all of the big parts of the skeleton were encased in plaster jackets and then lifted with a great big telehandler; basically, a forklift truck with an extending arm. The skull and the surrounding matrix, the clay and the supporting frame, and the plaster work weighs about a tonne - and the abdomen, the body section, that weighs about a tonne and a half. So, there's a big job to be done for those to be cleaned for the matrix to be removed, and that's when we can start doing that part of the science on the rest of the specimen. So often you only get the head or bits of the body preserved, and here we've got the whole thing; literally all the way down to the tiniest bones at the end of the tail which are the size of a penny. When it's cleaned up fully, we'll hopefully have some really great details of the bones to look at, which will give us extra detail on these animals, but also help us to work out the diversity of animals back at this time, 180 or so million years ago, in Rutland. But it's going be a big job.

Chris - At 10 meters, this Icthyosaur is the largest ever recorded in the UK. Quite a feat. Thanks very much to Mark Evans.