{"id":5197,"date":"2024-07-10T15:02:43","date_gmt":"2024-07-10T15:02:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/2024\/07\/10\/most-complete-dinosaur-fossil-in-a-century-discovered-on-the-isle-of-wight\/"},"modified":"2024-07-10T15:02:43","modified_gmt":"2024-07-10T15:02:43","slug":"most-complete-dinosaur-fossil-in-a-century-discovered-on-the-isle-of-wight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/2024\/07\/10\/most-complete-dinosaur-fossil-in-a-century-discovered-on-the-isle-of-wight\/","title":{"rendered":"Most complete dinosaur fossil in a century discovered on the Isle of Wight"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The fossil of a herbivorous dinosaur, as big as an American male bison, has been discovered on the Isle of Wight. <\/p>\n

It is the most complete dinosaur skeleton discovered in the UK in a century, with 149 bones in total.<\/p>\n

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The hefty dinosaur, now called Comptonatus chasei, roamed southern England around 125 million years ago and would have weighed as much as an African elephant.<\/p>\n

The isle of Wight only became separated from the mainland around 7,000 years ago.<\/p>\n

“It was likely to be a herding animal, so possibly large herds of these heavy dinosaurs may have been thundering around if spooked by predators on the floodplains,” said Jeremy Lockwood, a PhD student at the University of Portsmouth.<\/p>\n

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The dinosaur belongs to a group of herbivorous dinosaurs known as iguanodontians, large, bulky creatures often described as the “cows of the Cretaceous period” by palaeontologists.<\/p>\n

It was discovered by fossil hunter Nick Chase who sadly died of cancer just before the COVID-19 pandemic. The species is named after him.<\/p>\n

It took Mr Lockwood and his colleagues several years before the specimen could be prepared for analysis.<\/p>\n

He said: “I began looking at the specimen six years ago and described it as part of my PhD thesis, which took five years.<\/p>\n

“So it was quite a long journey from finding to publication.”<\/p>\n

Paying tribute to Mr Chase, Mr Lockwood said: “Nick had a phenomenal nose for finding dinosaur bones.”<\/p>\n

“He collected fossils daily in all weathers and donated them to museums,” he added.<\/p>\n

“I was hoping we’d spend our dotage collecting together as we were of similar ages, but sadly that wasn’t to be the case.<\/p>\n

“Despite his many wonderful discoveries over the years, including the most complete Iguanodon skull ever found in Britain, this is the first dinosaur to be named after him.”<\/p>\n

Nick Chase also discovered the remains of Europe’s largest-ever land-based predator dinosaur on the island, <\/strong>which were revealed last year.<\/p>\n

The Isle of Wight has become a fossil hunters’ paradise in recent years, with eight extinct species being named there in the last five years.<\/p>\n

Mr Lockwood said the latest “remarkable find” shows southern England may have once had “one of the world’s most diverse ecosystems”.<\/p>\n

In fact, the Natural History Museum describes the Isle of Wight as “one of the UK’s richest dinosaur fossil sites”.<\/p>\n

Last year, a new species of armoured dinosaur<\/strong> was found on the island and bones from a new species in the Tyrannosaurus rex family<\/strong> were discovered four years ago by two fossil hunters on separate holidays.<\/p>\n

In 2021, two species of large predatory dinosaur were revealed as well.<\/p>\n

Scientists named one of them the “horned crocodile-faced hell heron”, or Ceratosuchops inferodios in Latin.<\/p>\n

One of the palaeontologists involved in the find said he’d been waiting for a discovery like that on the Isle of Wight for a couple of decades, but that finding two in close succession was a “huge surprise”.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

This post appeared first on sky.com<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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