Discovered on the Isle of Wight in England, experts are calling the fossil remains of a plant-eating dinosaur the most complete species unearthed in Britain in a hundred years. The dinosaur was thought to have walked the world some 125 million years ago.
Jeremy Lockwood, a PhD student at the University of Portsmouth who worked on the discovery, stated in a statement that the herbivorous species was probably a herding animal, weighing around 900 kilogrammes (1990 lbs), which is roughly the same as a large male American bison.
Dead fossil collector Nick Chase unearthed the 149-bone dinosaur in 2013 from the Isle of Wight’s rocks at Compton Bay, which is off the coast of southern England.
The genus “Comptonatus chasei” was chosen in honour of Chase.
“Nick had a phenomenal nose for finding dinosaur bones … This really is a remarkable find,” Lockwood said.
Journal of Systematic Palaeontology article describing the species was co-authored by Lockwood and published in the journal. “It helps us understand more about the different types of dinosaurs that lived in England in the Early Cretaceous,” Lockwood added.
On the island, palaeontologists found the fossilised bones of a prehistoric predator that ate meat in 2022. This predator was larger than anything previously seen in Europe. The Cretaceous Period was also its time of origin.
(Source: Reuters)
