As per the latest discovery, an ancient jawbone fossil was found on a rocky English beach and it is believed that it belongs to one of the biggest marine animals on record. The researchers found out that the jawbone is about 205 million years old and belongs to a prehistoric reptile called giant ichthyosaur.

According to the scientists, they estimated that the size of the ichthyosaur is about 85 feet or 26 meters long. The scientists are able to say the total size of the reptile just by using one bone, and this creature is said to live from the Early Triassic until the Late Cretaceous periods on the Earth. They are the large marine reptiles that roamed the seas during the age of the dinosaurs.

The jawbone fossil was found during the month of May 2016 on the coast of Lilstock, Somerset, which is in the Southwest of England. This fossil was found by the collector Paul de la Salle, who is also the co-author of the new study which describes the fossil and the same was published in the journal PLOS One.

Paul de la Salle said in another statement that when he found that fossil, it looked like a piece of rock, but later he recognized the groove and bone structure. He then contacted ichthyosaur experts Dean Lomax who is at University of Manchester and Judy Massare who is at State University of New York College at Brockport. They agreed to study the specimen which he had found and thought that this fossil might belong to ichthyosaur.

Masare and Lomax then analyzed the bone and found out that it was a bone which came from the lower jaw of the large ichthyosaur specimen. They also compared this fossil with the other specimen which was kept at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Alberta, Canada.

As the fossil only represented a large piece of lower jaw, so it was difficult to figure out the exact size of the ichthyosaur. However, the researchers estimated the size by using a simple scaling factor which shows that the current specimen is about 25 percent larger than previously largest ichthyosaur Shonisaurus sikanniensis.