UK Scientists Identify New Dinosaur Species Hidden in Museum for Over a Century

A partial skull sat in a drawer at the Natural History Museum in London for more than a century, waiting. The fossil arrived in 1924, plucked from a cliff face on the Isle of Wight by an amateur paleontologist named Reginald Walter Tooley, who would spend his lifetime finding more than a thousand specimens before he died. But this one—this piece of bone—remained unstudied, filed away among thousands of others, until recently when scientists decided to look at it properly.

What they found changed the picture of how dinosaurs lived and moved across the ancient world. Using CT scans and 3D modeling, paleontologists discovered that the skull belonged to a species no one had ever formally identified before. They named it Invictibellatrix amberina, a name that translates to "unconquered female warrior," with a nod to the amber found in the rock layers where the fossil was discovered. The research was published this week, and the museum announced the finding on Wednesday.

Invictibellatrix belonged to a group called megaraptors—two-legged carnivores with enormous arms and curved claws that hunted during the early Cretaceous period, roughly 120 million years ago. They were theropods, distant cousins of tyrannosaurs, but built on a different scale. This particular specimen was small by megaraptor standards: three to four meters long, standing about a meter and a half tall. For perspective, that's roughly human-sized, which is precisely what made it dangerous. Dr. Cassius Morrison, the lead researcher on the study, put it bluntly: a human would have been perfectly sized prey for this animal—about a third of its body weight. A T. Rex would have ignored us as too small to bother with. Invictibellatrix would have hunted us without hesitation.

Since humans did not exist in the Cretaceous, the animal ate what was actually available: small dinosaurs, lizards, and mammals. Its hunting strategy relied on those long arms and the curved claws—four to eight inches long—rather than on its jaws. The creature likely had feathers, adding another layer of detail to how we now picture these predators moving through their world.

What makes this discovery significant is geography. Invictibellatrix is the first megaraptor fossil ever found in Europe. Until now, the group was thought to have originated in Asia, with some members migrating south. The skull from the Isle of Wight confirms they also spread westward into Europe. Some megaraptors grew to enormous sizes, rivaling tyrannosaurs in scale. By the late Cretaceous, they had likely vanished from northern regions but became apex predators in the south. The fossil record for megaraptors remains sparse—few specimens have been recovered anywhere—which means each new find rewrites the map of where these animals lived and how they dominated their ecosystems. A bone in a drawer, overlooked for more than a hundred years, has now filled in a piece of that story.