Last February, Joe Davis, a landscaper who works at Rutland Water Nature Reserve. spotted something odd poking out of the mud. He called the county council and said, “I think I’ve found a dinosaur.”

It wasn’t a dinosaur. But it was the fossilized remains of a 10m-long reptilian sea predator called an ichthyosaur. And it was the largest of its type ever discovered in the UK.

BBC News reports that Dr Dean Lomax, a palaeontologist from Manchester University, was brought in to lead the excavation effort. He called the discovery “truly unprecedented” and – due to its size and completeness – “one of the greatest finds in British palaeontological history”.

“Usually we think of ichthyosaurs and other marine reptiles being discovered along the Jurassic coast in Dorset or the Yorkshire coast, where many of them are exposed by the erosion of the cliffs. Here at an inland location is very unusual.”

(See our previous post, She Sells Seashells by the Seashore — Remembering Mary Anning, about the woman credited with finding the first correctly identified ichthyosaur skeleton on the Dorset Coast.)

Rutland is more than thirty miles from the coast, but 200 million years ago higher sea levels meant it was covered by a shallow ocean.

Huge fossilised ‘sea dragon’ found in UK – BBC News

Thanks to Alaric Bond for contributing to this post.