This year, Museum scientists have described and named over 350 new species,
including some miniature frogs, no bigger than the size of a coin,
to a bunch of stick insects from tropical Australia.
But we're going to look at some of the older new species described this year.
Both are armoured dinosaurs, and both have been unearthed in China.
And these dinosaurs are telling researchers more about the early evolution of armoured dinosaurs
during the Jurassic Period, some 200 to 145 million years ago.
First up, we're going to take a look at the earliest and most complete armoured dinosaur ever discovered in Asia.
I'm Professor Paul Barrett and I'm one of the dinosaur specialists at the Natural History Museum.
Over the last few months, I've been lucky enough to work with some Chinese colleagues
on a new dinosaur that they discovered in Yunnan province in southern China,
that we have named as a new species called Yuxisaurus.
Yuxisaurus is an early armoured dinosaur.
The armoured dinosaurs form a group called Thyreophora, which means shield bearer,
and is in reference to the many rows of armoured plates and spikes that run along their body
and would have been there for defence.
We know some armoured dinosaurs quite well.
Things like Stegosaurus, from later in the Jurassic is a famous example of the group,
but this is one that's actually much closer to the origin of the group
way back in time, nearer to its common ancestor.
And so shows us how the features that we see more elaborately
in things like stegosaurs and the tank-like ankylosaurs started their evolutionary journey.
So this find is from about 190 million years ago,
making it one of the earliest armoured dinosaurs that we know about.
It's not the earliest armoured dinosaur,
we also have other similar animals that we know from the U.K. and from Germany and the U.S.
But what it does show is that these types of dinosaurs spread very quickly all over the world
within only a few million years of their origin.
This animal was alive at a time when a supercontinent called Pangea,
that included all of the continents, started to split apart.
But nevertheless, there were still land connections
between many of the different continents that we would recognise today.
And these connections allowed the ancestors of Yuxisaurus to move backwards and forwards
and allowed them to colonise the area that then became China.
We know a lot about the evolution of armoured dinosaurs in other parts of the world.
Up until now, surprisingly, China has not given us very much of this early armoured dinosaur record.
But Yuxisaurus fills that gap, providing us with the first really good early armoured dinosaur material
from the entire Asian continent.
While Yuxisaurus might be the oldest, our next armoured dinosaur
is telling researchers more about the early evolution of stegosaurs
and why China could be so important in finding out more
about the origins of this group during the Middle Jurassic.
I'm Dr Susie Maidment, and I'm a dinosaur researcher here at the Natural History Museum.
This year we described a new stegosaur, Bashanosaurus primitivus, and it's from China.
It's from a town in China called Chongqing.
And the specimen is Middle Jurassic in age, it's around 167 million years old.
And that makes it one of the oldest stegosaurus that we know.
And that's why its species name is primitivus.
It's one of the oldest, but actually on the family tree, it's one of the earliest branching stegosaurs as well.
So it's one of the most primitive stegosaurs we know.
We don't have a complete skeleton of Bashanosaurus so we don't have a really good idea of all of its body shape.
But it was certainly a bit smaller than Stegosaurus and it had much smaller plates
and they were probably a bit more spine-like.
Some of Stegosaurus' plates are up to a metre in size and they're very thin.
But Bashanosaurus' are much more like spines.
And they were maybe only 20 or 30 centimetres in size.
Dinosaurs from the Middle Jurassic are really important to help us understand
how we went from sort of two legged animals that had forelimbs modified for grasping and that were quite small
to the whole diversity of herbivores that we see by the time we get to the Upper Jurassic.
So the Middle Jurassic is this really critical time
where we see all of these groups of dinosaurs radiating and really diversifying.
And Bashanosaurus comes right from this time period.
And that's why it's so interesting,
because it's kind of acting like a bridge between those much older, more primitive armoured dinosaurs
that we're seeing from places like Charmouth in Dorset
to things like Stegosaurus from the Upper Jurassic
and also a whole bunch of European stegosaurs that we know as well.
So we know quite a lot about their anatomy. We don't have a good idea of these Middle Jurassic ones
and Bashanosaurus is really kind of the first step in helping us to understand that.
So the Middle Jurassic is this really critical time
to help us understand the diversity of all of these different dinosaurs
and how that diversity kind of first established itself.
But the problem is in Europe and North America,
which are the areas where we've sampled the fossil record the best,
we actually have only marine deposits from the Middle Jurassic.
So we don't have loads of Middle Jurassic dinosaurs, because dinosaurs lived on land.
So if we want to understand the early evolution and radiation of these groups of dinosaurs,
we need to go and look for areas of the Earth where we have Middle Jurassic deposits
that were deposited on land.
And Sichuan province in China, and particularly these two formations,
the upper and the lower Shaximiao formations, are stuffed full of Middle Jurassic animals.
And that's really critical and important in helping us understand
this early evolution of all of these different groups.
China is a very large country.
It has a huge amount of rock outcrop.
And that means the potential to find dinosaurs there is really, really high.
But these aren't the only new dinosaurs described by Museum scientists this year.
Professor Anjali Goswami was involved in describing a new species
of carnivorous dinosaur with tiny arms from Argentina.
Named Guemesia, it would have stalked what is now South America some 70 million years ago
and is helping the scientists understand how this part of the world changed
in response the asteroid that wiped the dinosaurs out.
These are just a tiny fraction of the new species described this year.
And with lots of fieldwork and study, it is more than likely
that there will be more new dinosaurs in the years to come.