Scientists have named the traditional reptile Brighstoneus simmondsi, believed to be from the Decrease Cretaceous interval, about 125 million years in the past. The genus Brighstoneous was named after Brighstone, an English city near the excavation web site. Simmondsi is a nod to beginner collector Keith Simmonds, who discovered the specimens.
Simmonds initially discovered the bones in 1978 on the Isle of Wight, an island off the south coast of England. The specimens have been saved within the Dinosaur Isle Museum in Sandown on the Isle of Wight till they have been examined over 40 years later for a unique examine.
“It is fairly frequent, if no more frequent, lately to find new dinosaurs in museum basements fairly than out within the subject,” mentioned examine creator Jeremy Lockwood, a doctoral scholar at London’s Pure Historical past Museum and College of Portsmouth in the UK.
On the time, Lockwood was conducting analysis on the variety of huge plant-eating iguanodontian dinosaurs, which included the Iguanodon and Mantellisaurus atherfieldensis, the most typical dinosaur fossil specimens discovered to date on the island.
An unintended discovery
After carefully analyzing the bones, Lockwood realized he had a brand new species of dinosaur on his fingers.
Each the Iguanodon and Mantellisaurus had a straight, flat nostril whereas the Brighstoneus had a rounded one, he mentioned. Brighstoneus additionally had extra tooth, which have been designed for chewing, Lockwood added.
Within the Decrease Cretaceous interval, grass and flowering crops weren’t broadly obtainable, so the dinosaur probably needed to eat robust crops like pine needles and ferns, he mentioned.
Utilizing the thigh and femur bones, scientists estimated the dinosaur was about 26 toes (8 meters) lengthy and weighed round 2,200 kilos (1,000 kilograms).
Previous to this discovery, scientists designated all delicate bones discovered on the island as Mantellisaurus whereas bigger bones have been categorized as Iguanodon.
“Brighstoneus exhibits that there was better range within the Decrease Cretaceous iguanodontians than we realized,” Lockwood mentioned.
Constructed in a different way
The Brighstoneus specimens have been additionally 4 million years older than the Mantellisaurus bones, so one may argue that they’re unlikely the identical species because of the lengthy size of time between the 2, he famous.
A few of the options of the bones, such because the jawline, are distinctive to Brighstoneus, mentioned Matthew McCurry, curator of paleontology at Sydney’s Australian Museum and senior lecturer on the College of New South Wales, who was not concerned within the examine.
The longer jaw was in a position to maintain 28 tooth, just a few greater than some other carefully associated species, McCurry mentioned.
Lockwood is fascinated with researching if dinosaur range fluctuated over time or if it stayed the identical over the course of 1 million years.
Dinosaur bones also can reveal what Earth was like thousands and thousands of years in the past, McCurry mentioned.
“Describing new species of dinosaurs is step one in piecing collectively what these previous ecosystems regarded like and in studying about how they modified over time,” he mentioned.
The examine naming Brighstoneus simmondsi was printed Wednesday within the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology.
Correction: An earlier model of this story misspelled the city identify of Brighstone.
