A Fossil Left in a Drawer for a Century Is Europe's First Megaraptoran Dinosaur
A skull fragment from the Isle of Wight, in London's Natural History Museum since 1924, turns out to be a new clawed predator that links Asian and southern relatives.
Wednesday, October 14, 2026/2 min read
For about a hundred years, a broken piece of skull sat in the Natural History Museum's collection in London, labelled and shelved and not understood. This week a team of palaeontologists said it belongs to a new dinosaur, and to a group nobody had firmly placed in Europe before.
The animal is named Invictibellatrix amberina. It is described in Royal Society Open Science as the first European megaraptoran, a lineage of long-armed, bipedal predators related to the tyrannosaurs, as blue News reported.
Where did the megaraptoran fossil come from?
The fragment came from the Wessex Formation on the Isle of Wight, a Lower Cretaceous deposit about 120 million years old, according to the summary of the paper on ScienceDaily, which credits University College London. It was collected by an amateur palaeontologist, Reginald Walter Tooley, and the museum acquired it in 1924. Nobody recognised it as a megaraptoran for nearly a century.
The paper's authors are Cassius Morrison, Charlie Scherer, Philip Mannion, Laura Porro, Brett Clark, Daniel Folkes and Paul Barrett. Morrison and Scherer are at UCL and Barrett is at the Natural History Museum.
How big was Invictibellatrix amberina?
Only part of the skull has been found, so the size is an estimate from relatives. The researchers put the animal at roughly 3 to 4 metres long and just over 1.5 metres tall, with claws of about 10 to 20 centimetres. It was probably feathered and probably used its arms and claws to take smaller prey, which blue News lists as dinosaurs, lizards and mammals.
CT scans of the braincase made the identification possible, by letting the team compare its shape with other predatory dinosaurs.
What is a megaraptoran, and why does a European one matter?
A specimen in Europe supports a proposed route in which the group spread from Asia through Europe and on to the southern continents, then known as Gondwana. The authors suggest megaraptorans were more widespread across Eurasia in the Early Cretaceous than the fossil record had shown.
The story does not end well for the northern branch. Megaraptorans seem to have vanished from Laurasia, the northern landmass that included Europe, by the Late Cretaceous, while in Gondwana they carried on evolving. ScienceDaily cites Maip macrothorax from Argentina, estimated at 9 to 10 metres long, as one of the later giants.
The find is also a reminder that museum drawers hold discoveries. A skull fragment can place an animal on the family tree, and size and diet here are estimates from relatives. More bone from the Wessex Formation would show how this small, feathered hunter lived. The authors' route from Asia through Europe is a proposal, and each new European specimen tests it.
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