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Remains of Jurassic dinosaur that roamed 166 million years ago found on Scottish island
The Scotsman
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06/03/2025
Remains of Jurassic dinosaur that roamed 166 million years ago found on Scottish island
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Learning
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00:00
I'm Dr Elsa Pancheroli and I'm a NERC Independent Research Fellow here at National Museum Scotland
00:05
and we're in the collection centre taking a look at some fossils.
00:10
This is the most complete dinosaur fossil currently from Scotland, also one of the first
00:17
ever found in 1973. Well the reason that we are only just finding out about this fossil now
00:23
is because although it was found in 1973, the people who originally saw it didn't realise the
00:29
significance of it. It was also extremely difficult to get at, a really difficult place on the shore
00:35
in the Isle of Skye. So it was only in the last few years that our research team then rediscovered it
00:41
and realised its significance and collected it. This fossil was sticking out of a very large
00:47
boulder which was just above the high tide line on the shore on the Isle of Skye, so very difficult
00:53
to get at because it was tidal in the first place but also just really awkward, you couldn't just
00:58
stand and look at it, you had to climb up just to see it. You can see on the surface here all of the
01:03
black bits are bones. Now the part that we could see sticking out on the shore when we found it
01:08
is this area here, but as we've exposed more of the bone from underneath the rock you can
01:15
see there's all kinds of bits and pieces and they're very jumbled up. So it's hard to know
01:19
exactly what everything is but this part here appears to be part of the pelvis, so the hips of
01:24
the dinosaur, going down possibly into the leg here, and then we have little bits of what look
01:29
like parts of ribs and vertebrae scattered throughout. So it's a bit jumbled up but we do
01:36
know for certain that this is a dinosaur. Looking at the shape of these bones tells us that it's
01:41
probably belonging to the same group of dinosaurs as animals like a guanidon, but from much earlier
01:46
in their evolution. The significance of it being a Middle Jurassic dinosaur, it makes it globally
01:53
very rare and very important. At first we weren't sure if we wanted to collect it because we weren't
01:57
sure if it was going to be significant, but as we began to look we realised there were multiple bones
02:02
and we thought it probably belonged to a dinosaur. So we came back with a large team and ended up
02:08
collecting it from this boulder on the foreshore, very difficult to access. We could only get there
02:15
at the lowest of tides and of course the specimen's very heavy and difficult to move. This is actually
02:20
smaller than it was when we first collected it. But with the help of some of the local community
02:26
we were able to get it onto a rib and return it to the harbour and take it away for study.
02:31
You might be able to see there are cracks through it and these are pieces that we scanned using a CT
02:35
scanner separately, hoping to see if there were more bones inside the rock, which there weren't,
02:41
so that was fine. So we didn't really get more information from that. But the final thing we did
02:45
was just here there's a piece of bone that we were able to cut through and then do a histological
02:51
study, so that's the microstructure of the bone, and from that we could compare it to other
02:57
histological studies of dinosaurs and confirm that this is most likely belonging to the same
03:03
group of dinosaurs as a gowanodon. Our team has been finding a lot of fossils from the
03:08
Middle Jurassic rocks on the Isle of Skye and what's really significant about that is we don't
03:13
know a lot about the Middle Jurassic, not just for dinosaurs but all different animal groups,
03:18
so anything that we find from that time period is really important. But it also tells us a bit
03:22
about the ecosystem in general, so you know what ate what, how did they live, what was the
03:28
environment like, and every single fossil we find is a little piece of that puzzle and gives us a
03:33
better picture of ancient Scotland.
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