At the Museum our dinosaur gallery is full of interesting species
collected by scientists over many decades.
But in 2021, Museum scientists named five species that are completely new to science
Most dinosaur fans would recognise the iconic ankylosaur,
but in September the Museum named a brand-new species
with an astonishing characteristic.
I want to introduce to you Spicomellus afer, which is the oldest ankylosaur and the first from Africa.
The specimen is from the Middle Jurassic of Morocco,
from a site where we named the stegosaur Adratiklit a couple of years ago.
Probably the most unusual thing about this fossil is that it appears to be a dorsal rib,
so that's a rib from the back of the animal,
but it has an osteoderm, or a piece of armour plate fused to the dorsal surface and then four spikes protruding from that.
Now, this is morphology that we don't see in any living or extinct organism at all.
It's T-shaped in cross-section and we only see T-shaped ribs in stegosaurs and in ankylosaurs.
When we histologically sectioned the specimen,
we cut it up and we made a thin section, and we looked at it down the microscope.
We found that it has a tissue type that we only find in ankylosaurs among dinosaurs of this age.
And in fact, this is the first record of an ankylosaur from Africa.
Now, not only that, it's also the oldest ankylosaur from anywhere in the world.
It's intriguing because it suggests that these stegosaurs and ankylosaurs
were living alongside each other in these ecosystems as far back as the Middle Jurassic.
And also, there's a whole bunch of really, really weird things coming out of this site.
So I think that there's a sort of unrealised morphological diversity of ankylosaurs
that we have yet to find in the fossil record.
Theropods grew to huge sizes, with some reaching 12 metres in length,
but theropods were not always this big.
In October the Museum named a new species that was about the size of a chicken.
We've described a new theropod dinosaur species. We called it Pendraig milnerae
and it's actually a very interesting animal because it's the oldest known theropod dinosaur, so meat-eating dinosaur, from the UK.
And it's actually quite a small animalbecause contrary to all the famous theropods like the Tyrannosaurus,
theropods started out as quite small animals.
But even for these early theropod dinosaurs, the one we've now discovered is actually very, very small.
It's about the size of a chicken, more or less.
It was discovered in Wales, somewhere north-west of Cardiff,
and it was actually already discovered in the 1950s in a quarry where two palaeontologists were prospecting,
and for a very long time it's been in our collections here at NHM, but it was never formally published.
And now we had the opportunity, after it was lost in the collection for a little bit -
or it could not be recovered in the collection for a little bit -
we had the opportunity now to really formally describe it and name it for the first time.
And the species name 'milnerae'
is named after Angela Milner, who worked for a very long time in this Museum
and made a number of very important discoveries,
such as the discovery of Baryonyx, another meat-eating dinosaur.
And she sadly passed away very recently,
but she's also attached to this species in particular
because I mentioned earlier that this specimen was lost in the collection for a while
and it was actually Angela who managed to rediscover it.
So when my supervisor Susie asked, or was wondering where this specimen was because it couldn't be found,
Angela said, 'oh, I think I might have seen it.'
And then she went down to the collections and three hours later she came out with the specimen,
which was displaced somewhere on a shelf.
The Isle of Wight is famous for dinosaur fossils,
but sometimes you don't have to look very far to discover a new one.
The Isle of Wight is one of Europe's hotspots for dinosaur fossils
and we find many different types of dinosaur on the island,
but the fossil record has been dominated by two iguanodontians.
These are herbivorous dinosaurs with the iconic thumb spikes.
And over the last century, really everything is being put down as being either this big, robust animal Iguanodon bernissartensis
or the smaller, but still quite hefty animal Mantellisaurus atherfieldensis, which is on exhibition in the Museum.
It always seemed to be the wisdom that only these two survived for maybe 6 million years or more without changing
and this caused quite a bit of doubt to us, so we thought we'd re-evaluate all the material.
We were quickly surprised to find this new animal
which had been missed, as it was in [the Dinosaur Isle] Museum for over 40 years but in storage,
and so we sort of started looking at this very closely.
It had quite a lot of teeth, more teeth than Mantellisaurus
which was an indicator that it might be something different,
but for me the really exciting bit was the nose.
It was lockdown and I went in there as soon as I could
and we're trying to reconstruct the skull.
So I put it into a life position and I notice
really for the first time that this was a bulbous nose.
So this really made it stand out because Mantellisaurus
and Iguanadon have both got very straight noses.
So we were pretty sure at this stage that we had definitely got a new species.
So this is a really interesting point now because we have sort of broken
that mould of just the two and said there are more [species] out there.
So we're still going through this,
there's vast collections.
I mean, they've been collected for nearly 200 years
so a huge amount of material. We can see some here that was collected
from the island by William Fox, so this would have been in about 1860.
So now it's a really good time to start going through all this material bit by bit.
but, you know, we're very hopeful that there may be other taxa
that are actually hiding among all these bones.
Spinosaurs are among the most famous of dinosaurs, but they're also very rare to find.
with long snouts and lots of teeth
just imagine the surprise in September to find two new species at the same time.
I was down on the beach on the Isle of Wight one day
looking for fossils, when someone else who was collecting
suddenly started shouting and was obviously very excited
and picked up the snout, or rostrum, of a meat-eating dinosaur with large teeth coming out of it.
I mean these are incredibly rare,
you know, this is probably something that happens every 100 years.
And yet this person the following week found a second rostrum,
which meant we knew we'd got two of these animals lying around.
So I spent several weeks, months even, going back to the space
and I turned up there one day and I found a hole.
And I thought 'oh no' someone has been here just before me
and obviously found something, and I bet it's more of that skull.
So luckily, I found out that it was a chap called Brian Foster, who was a collector from Yorkshire,
and he was very happy to donate this to the [Dinosaur Isle] Museum.
And it actually turned out to be the brain case of this dinosaur
which sort of fitted with the skull.
So we sort of realised that we've got two new spinosaurids.
Lots of other collectors had found other bits and they were handing them into the [Dinosaur Isle] Museum,
so we were able to build up a three foot long skull with all these teeth
and actually show that we had two new species of spinosaurid on the island.
After a great year for new species, the Museum will continue the hunt for new dinosaur species
to help us learn more about the prehistoric world.