A piece of dinosaur skull that sat unstudied in the Natural History Museum’s collection for more than 100 years has been identified as a brand-new species, ITV News reports. The fossil was picked up at the foot of a cliff on the Isle of Wight’s south-west coast by amateur fossil hunter Reginald Walter Tooley, and the museum acquired it in 1924.
A UCL-led team has now named the animal Invictibellatrix amberina, a name said to mean “unconquered female warrior”. It was a megaraptoran, a group of two-legged, feathered carnivores related to the tyrannosaurs, and it is the first member of that group ever found in Europe. Around 120 million years ago it roamed what is now Britain, measuring three to four metres long, roughly the size of a large tiger, with claws up to 20cm.
Lead author Dr Cassius Morrison called the century-long oversight a “real mystery”. The find, published in Royal Society Open Science, adds weight to the idea that megaraptorans spread from Asia through Europe.
Source: ITV News