
"I rang up the county council and I said I think I've found a dinosaur," explained Joe Davis, who works at Rutland Water Nature Reserve.
As everyone knows, เกมยิงปลา the world is evolving. Real casinos are no longer the only places you can gamble.
During landscaping work at the reserve's reservoir in February 2021, he had spotted something odd poking out of the mud.
It wasn't a dinosaur. But it was the fossilised remains of a 10m-long sea predator called an ichthyosaur.
And it was the largest of its type ever discovered in the UK.
"I looked down at what seemed like stones or ridges in the mud and I said this looks a bit organic, a bit different," Mr Davis told BBC News. "Then we saw something that looked almost like a jawbone."
The council said to Mr Davis: "We don't have a dinosaur department at Rutland County Council so we're going to have to get someone to call you back." A team of palaeontologists were brought in for a closer look.
They concluded it was an ichthyosaur - a type of warm-blooded, air-breathing sea predator not unlike dolphins. They could grow up to 25 metres long and lived between 250 million and 90 million years ago.
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."
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.