An unknown dinosaur had been waiting for nearly a century in the collections of a London museum.
The story begins on the Isle of Wight, in southern England. In 1924, a fragment of a dinosaur skull joined the collections of London’s Natural History Museum. For decades, this specimen received little study. A new analysis has now revealed that it belonged to a previously unknown species of predator.
Image by Sergey Krasovskiy and Pedro Salas.
Researchers named it Invictibellatrix amberina. It lived around 120 million years ago, at a time when the Isle of Wight was a region of plains crossed by waterways. Based on its close relatives, it was probably three to four metres long and about one and a half metres tall.
Its appearance was very different from that of the famous tyrannosaur. This dinosaur walked on two legs, with a fairly agile body and probably feathers. Its arms likely carried long, curved claws, useful for grasping prey. It probably fed mainly on small dinosaurs, lizards and mammals.
How can a new species be identified from just a piece of skull? Researchers examined it with a scanner to observe its internal structure, then compared its shape with that of other carnivorous dinosaurs. Certain features of the bones, particularly around the opening for the spinal cord, caught their attention.
The comparisons placed this fossil among the megaraptorans, a group of predatory dinosaurs with large claws. This is the first time a member of this group has been identified in Europe. Until now, megaraptoran fossils had mainly come from other parts of the world.
This discovery provides a better understanding of their migrations. Researchers believe these animals may have appeared in Asia, then passed through Europe before reaching the southern continents. Much later, some of their descendants became enormous predators there.
The new fossil belongs to one of the oldest and smallest forms in the group. It shows that these dinosaurs were already spread across a large part of the planet at the beginning of the Cretaceous, before their various lineages followed separate paths.
For palaeontologists, the discovery is also a reminder that it is not always necessary to set out in search of new sites. Museums preserve millions of fossils, and some are still waiting for a fresh perspective to reveal their true story.