New Tiger-Sized Dinosaur Found in a Natural History Museum Drawer, Where It Sat Since 1924
Invictibellatrix amberina, the 'unconquered female warrior', waited almost a century for someone to open the right cupboard.
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Everyone has a drawer they’ve been meaning to sort out. Most of us find old chargers and a takeaway menu. The Natural History Museum found a new species of dinosaur.
The dinosaur
It’s called Invictibellatrix amberina, which means “unconquered female warrior,” the BBC reports. It was a megaraptoran, part of a group of agile, two-legged meat-eaters closely related to tyrannosaurs, except they attacked with long arms and giant curved claws instead of their jaws.
Researchers think it was three to four metres long, about as tall as a human, probably feathered, with claws of roughly 10 to 20 centimetres. It lived about 120 million years ago in the Early Cretaceous and ate small dinosaurs, lizards and mammals, filling a role in the food chain similar to a hyena today. It’s described in a new paper in Royal Society Open Science.
The drawer
The fossil, a chunk of the back of a skull, was found at the foot of a cliff on the Isle of Wight by amateur palaeontologist Reginald Walter Tooley. The museum acquired it in 1924, as one of more than 1,000 specimens it took in after his death.
Then it sat there. “It is a real mystery that this fossil was overlooked for so long, sitting in a drawer for nearly 100 years,” lead author Dr Cassius Morrison of UCL said. The team CT-scanned it, built a 3D model and compared it with the skulls of tyrannosaurs, spinosaurs and raptors to confirm it was something new.
The Snark take
Senior author Professor Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum put it diplomatically: “Work like this shows the exceptional value of working with historical museum collections where there are still many discoveries to be made.”
That is a polite way of saying the museum’s storage is a lucky dip. A predator the size of a large tiger was never actually extinct, just filed. Morrison added: “Lots of bones are found on the Isle of Wight – who knows what else is waiting to be discovered.” Our guess is the next drawer down.