After 35 years of searching the same beach, a couple found a 33-foot sea giant in the stone

Michel and Carine Plissart have spent 35 years combing the same stretch of Dorset coast for fossils — and this time the dark shapes they spotted in the sandstone turned out to be something extraordinary: a 10-metre (33-foot) ichthyosaur, a giant sea reptile that swam these waters 175 million years ago. It is the first ichthyosaur ever found in its layer of rock, and it was still hunting in these seas nine million years after volcanic eruptions had drained the oceans of oxygen and wiped out much of marine life. The landowner gave the fossil to Bridport Museum, where it is now the star of an exhibition running until April 2027, while Bristol University experts study what it can teach us.