✦
A dinosaur fossil that sat unnoticed in a museum collection for nearly a century has turned out to belong to a previously unknown predator with enormous curved claws. The new species was described on 14 October in the journal Royal Society Open Science, after a team led by University College London re-examined a skull fragment from the Isle of Wight.
The animal, named Invictibellatrix amberina, was roughly the size of a large tiger, measuring three to four metres long and just over a metre and a half tall. It lived about 120 million years ago, in the Early Cretaceous period, in what is now Britain. It is the first known European member of the megaraptorans, a mysterious group of meat-eating dinosaurs that were close relatives of tyrannosaurs but hunted in a very different way.
Rather than relying on powerful jaws, megaraptorans had narrow heads and used muscular arms and large curved claws to capture prey. Invictibellatrix probably had feathers, and its claws may have been 10 to 20 centimetres long. It would have eaten small dinosaurs, lizards and mammals, occupying a role in the food chain similar to that of a hyena today. It was not the apex predator of its time, but the lead author, Dr Cassius Morrison, said it would have been more dangerous to a human than a T. rex, because people would have been perfectly sized prey.
The fossil is a fragment from the back of the skull, collected by amateur fossil hunter Reginald Walter Tooley near the base of a cliff on the south-west coast of the Isle of Wight. It entered the Natural History Museum's collection in 1924 and remained largely overlooked until researchers used CT scanning to build a 3D reconstruction of the skull and the space that once housed the brain.
The discovery fills a major gap in the story of how megaraptorans spread. Until now, no fossils from the group had been found in Europe, leaving a missing link between their likely origins in Asia and their later rise in the southern continents, where some grew into predators as large as elephants. The name Invictibellatrix means unconquered female warrior, chosen to give hope to people who face bullying and hardship.
Source: SciTechDaily
