Researchers have identified a new species of dinosaur from a fossil found on the Isle of Wight more than 100 years ago.
The predator, named Invictibellatrix amberina, was about the size of a large tiger.
A paper in the journal Royal Society Open Science places it among the megaraptorans, a group of agile, two-legged carnivores.
Megaraptorans were closely related to tyrannosaurs, including Tyrannosaurus rex, but they had slender heads and attacked prey with their large arms and giant curved claws rather than their jaws.
Found at the foot of a cliff
Reginald Walter Tooley, an amateur palaeontologist, found the fossil, a chunk from the back of a skull, at the foot of a cliff on the Island’s south-west coast.
The Natural History Museum acquired it in 1924. It was one of more than 1,000 specimens Tooley found that the museum acquired after his death.
Lead author Dr Cassius Morrison, of UCL Earth Sciences, said it was “a real mystery that this fossil was overlooked for so long”.
How the team identified it
The researchers put the fossil through a CT scan and built a 3D model of that part of the skull.
They then compared it with skulls and brain cases from other two-legged meat-eaters, among them tyrannosaurs and spinosaurs.
The team also used mathematical modelling to work out how megaraptors spread around the world over time, drawing on the fossils found so far, dinosaur evolutionary trees, geography and climate.
A predator about as tall as a human
Invictibellatrix means unconquered female warrior, and it lived in the Early Cretaceous period about 120 million years ago.
It is one of the smallest and earliest megaraptorans found to date. Researchers believe it measured three to four metres long. Just over a metre and a half tall, about as high as a human.
It probably had feathers, and its claws may have been 10cm to 20cm long.
It would have eaten small dinosaurs, lizards and mammals, much as the hyena does today.
First megaraptoran in Europe
But until now, no megaraptoran had been found in Europe. And few megaraptor fossils have turned up anywhere, which has left them the most mysterious of the large meat-eating dinosaurs.
Professor Paul Barrett, the study’s senior author from the Natural History Museum, said the Isle of Wight “continues to surprise us with new dinosaur species”.
Dr Morrison said of the Island’s fossil beds: “who knows what else is waiting to be discovered”.
Source: BBC
