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New long-clawed British dinosaur species is first of its kind in Europe
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London, Oct 26: The fossilised skull of a new species of mysterious meat-eating dinosaur from the Isle of Wight has been rediscovered in the collections of the Natural History Museum after over 100 years in storage.
Over its nearly 150-year history, this London museum has become home to over 30 million specimens, making it fairly easy to forget about the odd fossil or rock here and there.
This is almost definitely what happened to the only known fossil of the UK’s newest dinosaur, a two-legged meat-eating theropod (the dinosaur family including birds) which we have named Invictibellatrix amberina in a new study. In 2020, Paul Barrett, one of the museum’s palaeontologists, looked through the fossil collections and came across a small chunk of bone which he recognised as an important part of the skull of a dinosaur: the braincase.
After going through museum records, he realised the braincase was found on a beach near Sudmoor Point on the Isle of Wight, an island off the south coast of England known for its world-famous dinosaur fossils.
Knowing that it came from the Isle of Wight, Barrett enlisted one of us (Cassius Morrison), a PhD student specialising in dinosaur braincases at the time, to study the fossil in detail and try to figure out which dinosaur it belonged to. This work showed that the roughly 120-million-year-old fossil was unlike anything found from the island before and belonged to a new species of a mysterious family of carnivores called the Megaraptora.
Megaraptorans are known for their slender skulls, lightly built skeletons and gigantic hand claws, with some of the larger species having claws over 1 foot long.
These ferocious predators are known from across the globe, with most species known from South America, particularly Argentina.
Our new British species, Invictibellatrix amberina, was on the smaller side for megaraptorans, about 5 metres from head-to-tail and weighed as much as a large tiger, making it the smallest known megaraptoran. (The Conversation)
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