London’s Natural History Museum has millions of specimens in its collection, and until recently at least one dinosaur nobody knew it had.
A fragment of skull that spent roughly a century in the museum’s holdings has turned out to belong to an entirely new species of carnivorous dinosaur, according to Discover. Better still, the creature appears to be Europe’s first known megaraptoran, a group of formidable prehistoric predators that have prevously identified elsewhere in the world.
The dinosaur has been given the elegant name Invictibellatrix amberina, which is quite a moniker for a speciman that spent much of the past hundred years in storage.
The fossil originally came from the Isle of Wight, where it was collected by amateur fossil hunter Reginald Walter Tooley. Following his death in 1924, the Natural History Museum acquired more than 1,000 specimens from his collection, including the skull fragment. It was subsequently identified as belonging to a dinosaur, but nobody quite knew which one.
That changed when researchers decided to give the old bone a closer look. Using CT scanning technology, they examined its internal structure and produced a three-dimensional model, allowing them to study anatomical details that had previously been difficult to see.
What they found was sufficiently unusual to warrant naming a new species. The fragment, which comes from the rear of the skull, had a distinctive combination of features that researchers linked to the megaraptorans. Their findings were published in Royal Society Open Science.
Despite the name, megaraptorans were among the species of raptors made famous by Jurassic Park. They were larger predatory dinosaurs, more closely related to tyrannosaurs, although they had a rather different approach to hunting. Instead of relying principally on enormous jaws, they possessed long, powerful arms ending in a set of wicked claws.
Invictibellatrix amberina lived around 120 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous period. Researchers estimate that it measured between 10 and 13 feet long and stood about five feet tall. It may also have sported feathers, though exactly what the animal looked like remains a matter of scientific reconstruction.
The discovery is significant for reasons beyond adding another dinosaur to the books. Megaraptorans have been found in Asia, Australia, and South America, but until now there had been no confirmed examples from Europe.
That absence presented a problem for scientists trying to understand how the animals spread around the prehistoric world. One theory holds that megaraptorans originated in Asia before moving west through Europe and eventually reaching Gondwana, the ancient southern landmass that included present-day South America, Africa, Antarctica, and Australia.
Finding one on the Isle of Wight lends weight to that theory. It also suggests that the dinosaur fauna of prehistoric Britain was more varied than scientists had realized.
Cassius Morrison, the study’s lead author and a researcher at University College London, described the long-overlooked fossil as a reminder of how much remains to be discovered in existing museum collections.