A chunk of dinosaur skull that sat in a London museum collection for nearly a century has turned out to be a new species, and the first megaraptor ever confirmed in Europe.
Researchers at University College London (UCL) and the Natural History Museum named the animal Invictibellatrix amberina. Their paper was published this week in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
What Was Found
The fossil is a piece of the back of the skull, the part that held the brain. An amateur fossil hunter, Reginald Walter Tooley, picked it up near the foot of a cliff on the southwestern coast of England’s Isle of Wight. The museum acquired his collection in 1924, and the bone then went largely unnoticed.
“It is a real mystery that this fossil was overlooked for so long, sitting in a drawer for nearly 100 years,” lead author Cassius Morrison of UCL said in the university’s announcement.
The team CT-scanned the bone to build a 3D model of it and the brain cavity inside. Features such as an oval opening where the spinal cord met the brain and an hourglass-shaped crest, compared against tyrannosaurs, spinosaurs, raptors and other predators, placed it among the megaraptorans: a group of two-legged hunters known for huge hand claws.
A Hyena-Sized Hunter, Not a T. Rex
The rocks it came from are about 120 million years old, from the Early Cretaceous. Based on its relatives, the researchers estimate it was roughly 10 to 13 feet long (3 to 4 meters) and just over 5 feet tall (1.5 meters), probably feathered, with claws perhaps 4 to 8 inches (10 to 20 centimeters) long.
It likely ate small dinosaurs, lizards and mammals, filling a role the team compares to a modern hyena. It was not the top predator of its world; that was probably a spinosaur.
Why it matters: megaraptorans are best known from the Southern Hemisphere, especially South America, where later members grew huge. Maip macrothorax from Argentina is estimated at 30 to 33 feet long (9 to 10 meters). A European member supports the idea that the group spread from Asia through Europe to the southern continents, then vanished from the north by the Late Cretaceous, possibly because of climate change or competition with tyrannosaurs.
The Catch
- The whole species rests on one skull fragment. Body size, feathers and claw length are educated guesses borrowed from related animals.
- Morrison’s suggestion that this smaller predator would have been more dangerous to a human than T. rex is a thought experiment, not a tested finding.
- Why megaraptorans disappeared from the north is still an open question.
The bigger lesson is for museums everywhere, including the large U.S. collections: old drawers can still hold new species, especially now that CT scanning lets scientists see inside bones without damaging them.
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