Museum collections sometimes hold not just bones but entire chapters in the history of life on Earth, waiting for decades for their moment. That is exactly what happened with a fragment of a skull that had lain for nearly a century in London's Natural History Museum: it has recently been identified as the remains of a new species of predatory dinosaur — Invictibellatrix amberina.
According to a study published in Royal Society Open Science, this megaraptor lived about 120 million years ago on the territory of what is now the Isle of Wight. In size it was roughly that of a large tiger — three to four metres long, a little over one and a half metres tall, and weighing 200–300 kilogrammes. Unlike the later tyrannosaurs, these predators relied not so much on their jaws as on powerful forelimbs and curved claws up to 20 centimetres long.
The find is important not only as the first European evidence of megaraptors — a group previously known mainly from the southern hemisphere. It shows how diverse the fauna of the Early Cretaceous in Europe was and how these agile bipedal predators could have occupied niches similar to the role of hyenas or medium-sized predators in modern ecosystems.
The scientists used computed tomography to study the internal structure of the brain and skull. Comparison with related species suggested that Invictibellatrix probably had feathers and hunted small dinosaurs, lizards and mammals. The skull fragment was collected in the 1920s by an amateur palaeontologist at the foot of a cliff on the south-west coast of the Isle of Wight, and it was handed over to the museum in 1924.
Such discoveries are a reminder that even in well-studied regions and collections there is still room for surprises. They underscore the value of museum holdings, where countless specimens await an attentive eye and modern methods of analysis.
Working with historical collections helps us better understand how the planet's ecosystems changed and what lessons this offers for the conservation of biodiversity today.
