A new dinosaur named Xenoposeidon, which means "alien sauropod," has been found in a British museum's collection, more than 100 years after the fossil was uncovered.
The 140 million-year-old specimen was kept in London's Natural History Museum since its discovery in the early 1890s in Ecclesbourne Glen, near Hastings, in Sussex, England, by collector Philip James Rufford.
Recently, University of Portsmouth graduate student Mike Taylor, a specialist on the long-necked, pinheaded, herbivorous sauropods, was looking through material in the museum's collection and found an unusual looking vertebrae.
"I've spent the last five years doing nothing but looking at sauropod vertebrae, so I immediately realized it was something strange," Taylor said. "It was unmistakably a dorsal vertebra from a sauropod, but it didn't look like any dorsal I'd ever seen before."
He and colleague Darren Naish decided the bone came from near the animal's hip area, which allowed them to estimate the dinosaur's size and shape and to establish that Xenoposeidon is a new genus and species, and possibly a new family (a larger group) of dinosaur. Some sauropods were as big as whales and weighed as much as 12 elephants.
"The difference between this specimen and other sauropod vertebrae is sufficiently great that I concluded that it could not be placed in any existing species or genus," Taylor said. "In fact, it can't be placed in any existing sauropod family."
The description of Xenoposeidon will be detailed in the Nov. 15 issue of the journal Palaentology.
Source:Xinhua
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