A skull fragment kept in a museum drawer since 1924 turned out to be a new claw-handed dinosaur

A broken piece of the back of a dinosaur skull that the Natural History Museum in London acquired in 1924 has now been identified as a new species, Invictibellatrix amberina. The animal was a megaraptoran, a lightly built, two-legged predator with large hand claws, and it is the first member of that group ever recognised in Europe. For nearly 100 years the fragment sat in a museum drawer without anyone realising what it was.

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The identification came from a team at University College London and the museum, led by Dr Cassius Morrison of UCL Earth Sciences, and was published in the journal Royal Society Open Science in October 2026. Morrison called it “a real mystery that this fossil was overlooked for so long.”

How a 1924 drawer fossil was identified

The fossil reached the museum through the collection of Reginald Walter Tooley, an amateur palaeontologist who picked it up at the foot of a cliff on the Isle of Wight’s south-west coast. According to UCL’s announcement, it was one of more than 1,000 specimens that came to the museum after his death, and it went unstudied until the present team picked it up.

What remains is a piece of the braincase, which sounds unpromising. The researchers CT scanned it and compared it with tyrannosaurs, spinosaurs, raptors and other theropods, and found a combination of features that matched no known animal, including an oval opening for the spinal cord and an hourglass-shaped crest. That unique combination is what supported naming a new species rather than assigning the bone to an existing one.

The name itself carries a message. Invictibellatrix means “unconquered female warrior,” and amberina refers both to the amber in the rock layers where the animal was found and to a female name. The paper says the name is meant to give hope to people who are bullied, discriminated against or oppressed.

The delay is the detail Morrison keeps returning to. The fragment sat in the museum from 1924 until the team studied it, and the identification rested on CT scanning the braincase and comparing it with tyrannosaurs, spinosaurs, raptors and other theropods. A single bone, in other words, was enough once the comparison set was broad enough to show that it belonged to none of them, and once someone thought to look at it again after close to a century.

What a megaraptoran looked like

Morrison estimates the animal at 3 to 4 metres long and just over 1.5 metres tall, with hand claws of roughly 10 to 20 centimetres. ITV Meridian’s report adds that it probably had feathers, and that it lived about 120 million years ago in the Early Cretaceous. Those numbers are inferred, since only the skull fragment survives and the claw sizes are extrapolated from close relatives.

It was not the top predator of its ecosystem. The research indicates that a spinosaurid likely held that role on the floodplain, which alternated between wet and dry seasons, and Morrison suggests the new animal fed on small dinosaurs, lizards and mammals. Countryfile’s coverage describes a role similar to that of the hyena today. KSL’s report adds that megaraptorans relied on long, strong arms and massive hand claws rather than the crushing bite of Tyrannosaurus rex, with slender heads and lightly built skeletons. Morrison still gave the animal respect. “It was not the apex predator of its time, but for humans this dinosaur would have been more dangerous than a T. rex,” he said.

Why Europe’s first megaraptoran matters

Megaraptorans were already known from the southern continents, where Morrison has described them as apex predators, and the largest, Maip macrothorax from Argentina, is estimated at 9 to 10 metres long with claws up to 35 centimetres. The question the new fossil helps answer is how they got from one landmass to another, and until now Europe was a blank on that map. Charlie Scherer, a UCL PhD student and co-author, said the species is the first proof that megaraptorans were also present in Europe.

The authors think the group probably spread from Asia through Europe and on to Gondwana, the southern supercontinent, where descendants grew to enormous size. Their later disappearance from the northern landmasses, collectively called Laurasia, is unexplained. The researchers suggest climate change, environmental shifts or competition with tyrannosaurs as possible causes, but they present these as hypotheses rather than findings. The peer-reviewed paper sets out the anatomy and the evolutionary argument in full.

Paul Barrett, the Natural History Museum scientist who was senior author, said that despite more than 200 years of collecting, the Isle of Wight continues to surprise researchers with new dinosaur species. The museum’s own drawers, as this case shows, may hold more. Morrison made the same point in a different way when he said lots of bones are found on the Isle of Wight and that who knows what else is waiting to be discovered. The ScienceDaily summary notes that the work was funded by the Palaeontographical Society, the Royal Society and UK Research and Innovation.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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