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What happens when you find a dinosaur?
The Isle of Wight is renowned for dinosaur discoveries. Year after year the fossilised remains of prehistoric animals tumble out of the cliffs onto the beaches.
But if you know what you’re looking at, those little bits of bone can add up to something big.
Megan Jacobs is no stranger to finding fossils. She’s a lifelong collector and the co-founder of the fossil hunting experience company Wight Coast Fossils.
But even for a seasoned professional, finding a near complete dinosaur that could be a new species might be a once in a lifetime discovery.
How do you discover a dinosaur?
The Isle of Wight is one of the UK’s best locations for fossil hunting. The high rates of erosion caused by the ocean waves lapping against its cliffs, particularly in the stormy winters, is slowly revealing the remains of remarkable creatures that lived in the area many millions of years ago.
The island’s rocks are around 130 million years old. An enormous variety of fossils are hidden inside them, from bits of dinosaurs and flying reptiles to ammonites, crocodiles and Ice Age creatures, such as steppe bison and ancient horses. From this bounty of fossils, Megan’s made an exciting discovery.
‘In the winter, me and my Dad go down on the beach almost every day, and we scour the area looking for bones sticking out of the mud and on the beach,’ Megan says.
‘We started to find bones all coming from one area. When they start to add up, you think something must be going on - they’re all the same size and the same preservation. So, we started to have a poke around and found they were all coming out of the same bed.’
Megan Jacobs is a palaeontologist and co-founder of Wight Coast Fossils. Her discovery of a new dinosaur specimen could be a once-in-a-lifetime find.
Collecting their finds on the kitchen table, Megan and her dad were thrilled as the prehistoric puzzle of bone fragments started coming together.
‘It was the tibia - it all came out in chunks. We were sat looking at them all and they slowly started to click together and make this big bone, and that was really quite exciting. To finally have something substantial was a great feeling.’
Having spent consecutive winters searching, sometimes by painstakingly feeling their way through sticky clay for hard lumps that might be bone, they’re now close to having a complete animal.
‘I’ve found some really cool things, but nothing that equates to a nearly complete animal. It’s one of those things that’s almost once in lifetime.’
What’s the mystery dinosaur?
From the size and general shape of the bones, Megan started to think her find might be an Iguanodon or a close relative of it. Once she’d collected more of it, she called in Jeremy Lockwood - a fellow Isle of Wight palaeontologist and one of our PhD students. Megan delightfully dubs him ‘the Iguanodon man’ because ‘he knows his stuff’.
After inspecting the bones, Jeremy agreed with Megan’s suspicions.
‘Iguanodon man’ Jeremy Lockwood is no stranger to dinosaur discoveries, having described the iguanodontian Brighstoneus and uncovered two new spinosaurs from the Isle of Wight in 2021.
‘Imagine a small herbivore, probably four to five metres long. It’s quite a gracile animal, rather than a stocky thing, and it could probably run, not like a cheetah, more a gazelle-like animal, but as a dinosaur,’ Megan explains.
‘We think it’s closely related, if not the same, as the ones previously found from this area. It’s coming from a bed very close to the ones that have been described.’
What is an Iguanodon?
The genus Iguanodon is part of a group of related dinosaurs known as Iguanodontia. This family of plant-eaters lived during the Early Cretaceous Period, which lasted from 145 million to 100.5 million years ago.
It’s thought that Iguanodon mostly walked around on all fours, though it might sometimes have moved around on two legs. One of its best-known features is its spike-like thumbs, though it’s not clear exactly what these were used for. The thumbs could have been used as defensive weapons, in competition for mates, as tools to break into seeds or to strip foliage from branches.
Iguanodon thumb spikes make impressive fossils. In life they would’ve been coated in a layer of keratin making them even larger and possibly quite sharp.
Iguanodon was the second dinosaur ever described. This famous creature was discovered some 200 years ago by Mary Ann and Gideon Mantell who found several large, iguana-like teeth by the side of a road in Sussex.
Many dinosaurs were once put in the Iguanodon genus, but recent assessments have led to some of the species being reassigned to new genera. One example is Mantellisaurus atherfieldensis, the dinosaur on display in our Hintze Hall. It was once known as Iguanodon atherfieldensis.
But could Megan’s specimen be one of the dinosaurs we already know about or is it something new?
More than 20 types of dinosaurs have been found on the Isle of Wight so far. In fact, there’s so many in such a small space that it’s sometimes called Dinosaur Island.
Iguanodon is known from specimens found there, as are a few of its relatives, such as Mantellisaurus and a dinosaur Jeremy described recently called Brighstoneus. But it’s also highly likely there are more types of dinosaurs hidden in the island’s rocks just waiting to be discovered.
Mantellisaurus was first discovered in Atherfield on the southwest coast of the Isle of Wight.
What will happen to Megan’s dinosaur now?
There’s a little way to go before we’ll know for certain what this dinosaur is - whether it’s another example of something we already know of or something completely new.
Our dinosaur researcher Dr Susie Maidment says, ‘in order to tell if this is a new dinosaur, we’ll be looking out for very specific features of the anatomy. So, we might be looking out for particular-shaped nobbles on the bones that are different to the ones that we know.’
‘If there’s skull material, that’s really key. The teeth are really important. We’d hope to see some subtle differences between the material that’s here and other specimens we have in the Museum and on the Isle of Wight.’
If it’s a new dinosaur, a name would need to be created following strict rules and the description will have to be published in a scientific journal to make it official.
Our dinosaur researcher Professor Paul Barrett inspects the bones for characteristics that might tell us what kind of dinosaur Megan has found. In the background, Dr Susie Maidment and Jeremy Lockwood look at more of the dinosaur.
Before any of that can start, however, Megan is working on getting the rest of the skeleton out of the ground. While she has permission from the landowners to do so, it’s still no easy feat when you’re contending with the weather and tides, as well as other fossil collectors.
‘We’ve had two or three people that have stumbled across bits,’ explains Megan.
‘A couple of them have been working with us or have given us what they’ve found to keep the animal together. But it’s one of those things that you can’t police and you can’t control. Here, you have to accept that parts of your dinosaur might end up on someone’s living room table.’
Megan plans to clean up the bones in the lab before working with us to add it to our dinosaur collection.
‘It’s something we’re quite proud to have,’ says Megan ‘and we’ll hopefully have our names on a museum label one day’.
