A skull fragment that has sat in a drawer at London’s Natural History Museum since 1924 has been identified as a new dinosaur, Invictibellatrix amberina, the first megaraptoran ever recognized in Europe. The fossil came from the Isle of Wight and is about 120 million years old, dating to the Early Cretaceous.
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Researchers led by Cassius Morrison of University College London described the animal in the journal Royal Society Open Science in October 2026. The genus name means “unconquered female warrior,” a choice the authors say was meant to give hope and strength to people who are bullied, discriminated against or oppressed. The species name honors both the amber found in the rock layers that yielded the fossil and the female name Amberina. The paper lists seven authors: Morrison, Charlie R. Scherer, Philip Mannion, Laura B. Porro, Brett Clark, Daniel D. Folkes and Paul M. Barrett.
A fragment that waited nearly a century
The specimen is a partial rear skull fragment collected by Reginald Walter Tooley, an amateur paleontologist who found it near the base of a cliff on the island’s southwestern coast. The museum acquired it in 1924 as part of Tooley’s collection after his death, according to the university release carried by ScienceDaily, and it then went unrecognized for close to a century.
Morrison, the lead author, was struck by the long neglect. “It is a real mystery that this fossil was overlooked for so long, sitting in a drawer for nearly 100 years,” he said. According to Live Science’s account, the team came back to the bone while studying dinosaur braincases, which led them to scan it rather than simply catalogue it.
What CT scans revealed inside the bone
Micro-CT scanning produced a three-dimensional reconstruction of the fragment and an endocast, a model of the brain cavity. Diagnostic features included an oval opening where the spinal cord met the brain and an hourglass-shaped crest. Phylogenetic analyses, which compare anatomical traits across related species to build family trees, placed the animal inside Megaraptora, as set out in the peer-reviewed paper.
Megaraptorans are carnivorous, two-legged dinosaurs related to tyrannosaurs, including T. rex, but with relatively narrow skulls. They relied on powerful arms and large curved claws rather than massive jaws, and their fossils are rare enough that the group remains poorly understood. Some later members grew very large: Maip macrothorax from Argentina is estimated at 9 to 10 meters long, and some megaraptoran claws reached about 35 centimeters.
A modest predator with a large biogeographic message
Limits on the evidence are worth stating. The skull fragment does not preserve the arms or the claws that define the group, so the animal’s overall shape is reconstructed from better-known relatives rather than observed, and the length, height and weight figures are estimates. The fragment is nonetheless diagnostic, because the braincase features and the family-tree analyses point to the same placement within Megaraptora.
The Isle of Wight animal was far smaller, and Live Science puts its weight at about 200 to 300 kilograms, which makes it one of the smallest megaraptorans known. The team estimates a length of about 3 to 4 meters and a height just over 1.5 meters, living on a seasonally wet-to-dry floodplain recorded in the Wessex Formation. Because the skull is all that survives, the claws, put at roughly 10 to 20 centimeters, are inferred from relatives. It likely fed on small dinosaurs, lizards and mammals, a role the researchers compare to a modern hyena, and was probably feathered.
Morrison cautioned that it was not the top predator of its time, though he said that for humans it would have been more dangerous than a T. rex. The bigger significance is geographic. Co-author Charlie Scherer, a doctoral student at UCL, described the species as the first proof that megaraptorans were present in Europe.
That matters because scientists had proposed that the group evolved in Asia and spread through Europe to Gondwana, the southern supercontinent, yet no European fossil had backed the idea. Live Science reports that the spread into Europe is thought to have happened around 130 million years ago,. The new species supports that route. Megaraptorans were widespread in the Early Cretaceous but probably vanished from northern landmasses such as Europe by the Late Cretaceous, and the authors list climate change, environmental shifts and competition from tyrannosaurs as possible reasons while saying the cause is uncertain, as Sci.News also reported.
Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum, the senior author, said the case shows the value of revisiting historical museum collections, since many discoveries remain to be made. The find also reinforces how much of the fossil record may still be waiting in storage rooms rather than in the field, a point the authors make about historical collections generally. A broader summary appears in Countryfile’s coverage of the find.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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