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More than half a century after being first unearthed in a Welsh quarry, four small fossil fragments have finally been attributed to a new species of dinosaur.
Researchers at the Natural History Museum in London say Pendraig milnerae is the oldest carnivorous dinosaur ever discovered in the UK.
It existed over 200 million years ago, their analysis suggests.
The name Pendraig means “dragon chief” in Middle Welsh.
The animal was most likely the supreme predator in its environment. That said, it wasn’t exactly a giant. Think of something the size of a chicken with a really long tail.
“It was a typical theropod; therefore, a carnivorous dinosaur that walked on two legs, like T. rex Where Velociraptor that you will know from the movies, but much earlier in time, ”explained Dr Stephan Spiekman of the NHM.
This is one of those classic fossil stories.
Pendraig is described by only four pieces of bone, although beautifully preserved. A vertebra, parts of the pelvis and a femur. These items were originally mined from a limestone quarry near Cowbridge in South Wales in the 1950s.
Their interesting characteristics were sometimes discussed within the NHM, but the fossil material then got lost in the museum’s vast collections, mistakenly stored with crocodilian remains.
It is only recently that the bones have been recovered from the “wrong drawer” and recognized for their true significance.
Pendraig is really old. It is the age of the Late Triassic. It could be up to 214 million years old, which brings it closer to the base of the emergence of dinosaurs.
Indeed, Pendraig would have been a fossil when the previous mentioned T. rex and Velociraptor were still strutting in the Cretaceous, just before the asteroid struck to wipe them both from Earth’s surface 66 million years ago.
“We only have these four fragments, but the preservation is fantastic. The fossil is completely three-dimensional, it is not distorted,” Dr Spiekman told BBC News.
“What is so interesting and important here is that we get to see the very early stages of the evolution of dinosaurs. These animals came to dominate the Earth, but by the end of the Triassic they were only ‘one of the many groups of reptiles that lived on earth. “
Geological study of the British Isles tells us that at this time what is now the Bristol Channel region of the UK was a series of islands made up of much older limestone that had been bent and pushed upward. .
Pendraig would have lived somewhere across the archipelago.
How this particular specimen died, we can only speculate. But his bones were embedded in a gryke, or crack, in the limestone. Maybe the dinosaur fell in; maybe he was already dead and was washed away in a flood. No one can say for sure.
There is a little puzzle related to the size of the animal, which is a small side of what one would expect. Dr. Spiekman wondered if Pendraig could be an example of dwarfism, a phenomenon that is sometimes seen in species confined to islands and their limited resources. But the analysis in this case did not come to any firm conclusions.
The second part of PendraigThe name – her species name – recognizes an influential figure in British dinosaur science: Angela Milner, who died in August.
The former deputy custodian of paleontology at the Natural History Museum was associated with another major theropod discovery in the 1980s – an animal called Baryonyx – and was instrumental in the discovery Pendraig milnerae to light up again.
“It was not lost for very long in the collections, but it is Angela who must be thanked for having found it. She had remembered seeing him and had gone to rummage in the drawers of the museum. And after three or four hours she came back and said, I found it! ”Recalled co-author Dr Susie Maidment.
“Angela had a very influential career in British paleontology and was a huge loss to us here at the museum. We were describing the fossil when she died, but we wanted to pay tribute to her by giving her name. “
Pendraig milnerae is reported in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
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