Professor’s decades-old find on a Northern Irish beach turns out to be the island’s very first dinosaur find

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People often encounter coins, seashells and trash, but a teacher from Northern Ireland has made a discovery that will go down in history.

In the 1980s, the late Roger Byrne, a schoolteacher and fossil collector, found several unidentified fossils on the east coast of County Antrim. He kept them for several years before giving them to the Ulster Museum in Belfast.

The mystery revolved around what the fossils might be until a team of researchers from the University of Portsmouth and Queen’s University in Belfast confirmed they were fossilized dinosaur bones.

The 200-million-year-old fossils are the “first reported dinosaur remains from anywhere in Ireland,” according to the research team’s article, published this month in the Proceedings of the Association of geologists.

“This is an extremely important finding,” Mike Simms, a paleontologist at National Museums NI who led the team of researchers, said in a statement Tuesday. “The great rarity of these fossils here is due to the fact that most Irish rocks are of the wrong age for dinosaurs, either too old or too young, making it almost impossible to confirm the existence of dinosaurs on these coasts.”

The researchers wrote in their article that folklore attributes the apparent absence of dinosaur remains from Ireland to the activities of Saint Patrick, who is credited with driving the snakes out of Ireland. But the lack of fossilized dinosaur bones is simply due to geology, they said. The rocks of the country are of the wrong age or the wrong type.

“Finding an Irish dinosaur may seem like a hopeless task, but, nonetheless, several potential candidates have been identified and are described for the first time here,” the article states.

Researcher Robert Smyth and Professor David Martill of the University of Portsmouth analyzed the bone fragments with high-resolution 3D digital models of the fossils, produced by Dr Patrick Collins of Queens University of Belfast.

Originally, the researchers believed the bones were from the same animal, but later determined that they were from two different dinosaurs.

“By analyzing the shape and internal structure of the bones, we realized that they belonged to two very different animals,” Smyth said in the press release.

“One is very dense and sturdy, typical of an armored plant eater. The other is slender, with thin bony walls and features only found in predatory two-legged dinosaurs that move around. quickly called theropods. “

Both fossils were pieces of the animal’s leg bones, the researchers said. One was part of a femur of a four-legged herbivore called Scelidosaurus. The other was part of the tibia belonging to a two-legged meat eater similar to Sarcosaurus.

The beach where the fossils were found is covered with rounded fragments of basalt and white limestone, according to the newspaper article. He noted that the fossils in this area are generally rare and heavily abraded.

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“The two dinosaur fossils Roger Byrne found may have been washed out to sea, alive or dead, sinking into the Jurassic seabed where they were buried and fossilized,” Simms said.

This discovery sheds light on the life of the dinosaurs that roamed millions of years ago.

“Scelidosaurus continues to appear in marine strata, and I’m starting to think that maybe it was a coastal animal, maybe even eating algae like marine iguanas do today,” Martill said.

The Ulster Museum, which is closed due to coronavirus restrictions, plans to display the bones when those restrictions are lifted, the press release said.



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