Phys.org has a story about a new dinosaur discovery in the United Kingdom. The new animal, Invictibellatrix amberina, lived about 120 million years ago, during the Cretaceous Period in what is now the Isle of Wight in the United Kingdom. I. amberina belongs to a group of dinosaurs known as the Megaraptora. The description was published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

In 2020, Paul Barrett, one of the museum’s paleontologists, looked through the fossil collections and came across a small chunk of bone which he recognized as an important part of the skull of a dinosaur: the braincase. After going through museum records, he realized the braincase was found on a beach near Sudmoor Point on the Isle of Wight, an island off the south coast of England known for its world-famous dinosaur fossils.

Knowing that it came from the Isle of Wight, Barrett enlisted one of us (Cassius Morrison), a Ph.D. student specializing in dinosaur braincases at the time, to study the fossil in detail and try to figure out which dinosaur it belonged to.

This work showed that the roughly 120-million-year-old fossil was unlike anything found from the island before and belonged to a new species of a mysterious family of carnivores called the Megaraptora.