[Rockhounds] UK’s most complete dinosaur fossil in a century reveals new species

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

A previously unknown species of plant-eating dinosaur roamed on an island
off the south coast of England around 125 million years ago, new research
has found.

The dinosaur would have been the size of a large American bison and weighed
around a ton, according to Jeremy Lockwood, a doctoral researcher at the
University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom and lead author of a study
on the prehistoric creature.

Fossilized footprints found near the skeleton show the dinosaur was
probably a herding animal, Lockwood said, adding: “Possibly large herds of
these dinosaurs may have been thundering around if spooked by predators on
the floodplains over 120 million years ago.”

The dinosaur fossil, comprising 149 bones, was discovered on the Isle of
Wight in 2013 and is the most complete skeleton found in the UK in more
than a century, the research
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14772019.2024.2346573>published
in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology said.

The bones were found by avid local fossil collector Nick Chase, who died of
cancer in 2019.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/10/science/new-dinosaur-species-discovered-in-uk/index.html