Who she is
A child who found part of a giant. In May 2020, when she was eleven, she and her father Justin were hunting fossils on the beach at Blue Anchor, in Somerset, England. Someone had left a lump of bone on a boulder at the top of the beach. So they searched the shore below it.
What she found
Ruby found a bigger piece. It was heavy, and as thick as her arm. It was far too big to come from anything ordinary. Her father had seen a bone like it before: four years earlier, a collector named Paul de la Salle had found an almost meter-long jaw bone farther along the same coast. So the family called the scientist who had studied it, Dean Lomax.
The jigsaw
For more than two years, the family and the scientists searched the mud of that beach. Piece by piece, the bone came together like a jigsaw. The last piece turned up in October 2022. In 2024, the animal got its name: Ichthyotitan, a sea reptile that may have been as long as a blue whale.