First complete dinosaur skeleton ever found
is ready for its closeup at last
27 August 2020
animal as it might have appeared in life and made
no attempt to understand its relationship to other
known dinosaurs of the time. In short, he 're-buried'
it in the literature of the time, and so it has
remained ever since: known, yet obscure and
misunderstood.
Over the past three years, Dr. David Norman from
Cambridge's Department of Earth Sciences has
been working to finish the work which Owen
started, preparing a detailed description and
biological analysis of the skeleton of Scelidosaurus,
the original of which is stored at the Natural History
Museum in London, with other specimens at Bristol
City Museum and the Sedgwick Museum,
Cambridge.
The first complete dinosaur skeleton ever identified has The results of Norman's work, published as four
finally been studied in detail and found its place in the separate studies in the Zoological Journal of the
dinosaur family tree, completing a project that began Linnean Society of London, not only reconstruct
more than a century and a half ago. Credit: John Sibbick what Scelidosaurus looked like in life, but reveal
that it was an early ancestor of ankylosaurs, the
armour-plated 'tanks' of the Late Cretaceous
Period.
The first complete dinosaur skeleton ever identified
has finally been studied in detail and found its For more than a century, dinosaurs were primarily
place in the dinosaur family tree, completing a classified according to the shape of their hip bones:
project that began more than a century and a half they were either saurischians ('lizard-hipped') or
ago. ornithischians ('bird-hipped').
The skeleton of this dinosaur, called However, in 2017, Norman and his former Ph.D.
Scelidosaurus, was collected more than 160 yearsstudents Matthew Baron and Paul Barrett argued
that these dinosaur family groupings needed to be
ago on west Dorset's Jurassic Coast. The rocks in
rearranged, re-defined and re-named. In a study
which it was fossilised are around 193 million years
old, close to the dawn of the Age of Dinosaurs. published in Nature, the researchers suggested
that bird-hipped dinosaurs and lizard-hipped
This remarkable specimen—the first complete dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus evolved from a
dinosaur skeleton ever recovered—was sent to common ancestor, potentially overturning more
Richard Owen at the British Museum, the man who than a century of theory about the evolutionary
invented the word dinosaur. history of dinosaurs.
So, what did Owen do with this find? He published Another fact that emerged from their work on
two short papers on its anatomy, but many details dinosaur relationships was that the earliest known
were left unrecorded. Owen did not reconstruct the ornithischians first appeared in the Early Jurassic
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Period. "Scelidosaurus is just such a dinosaur and
represents a species that appeared at, or close to,
the evolutionary 'birth' of the Ornithischia," said
Norman, who is a Fellow of Christ's College, Provided by University of Cambridge
Cambridge. "Given that context, what was actually
known of Scelidosaurus? The answer is remarkably
little!"
Norman has now completed a study of all known
material attributable to Scelidosaurus and his
research has revealed many firsts.
"Nobody knew that the skull had horns on its back
edge," said Norman. "It had several bones that
have never been recognised in any other dinosaur.
It's also clear from the rough texturing of the skull
bones that it was, in life, covered by hardened
horny scutes, a little bit like the scutes on the
surface of the skulls of living turtles. In fact, its
entire body was protected by skin that anchored an
array of stud-like bony spikes and plates."
Now that its anatomy is understood, it is possible to
examine where Scelidosaurus sits in the dinosaur
family tree. It had been regarded for many decades
as an early member of the group that included the
stegosaurs, including Stegosaurus with its huge
bony plates along its spine and a spiky tail, and
ankylosaurs, the armour-plated 'tanks' of the
dinosaur era, but that was based on a poor
understanding of the anatomy of Scelidosaurus.
Now it seems that Scelidosaurus is an ancestor of
the ankylosaurs alone.
"It is unfortunate that such an important dinosaur,
discovered at such a critical time in the early study
of dinosaurs, was never properly described," said
Norman. "It has now—at last! - been described in
detail and provides many new and unexpected
insights concerning the biology of early dinosaurs
and their underlying relationships. It seems a
shame that the work was not done earlier but, as
they say, better late than never."
More information: David B Norman,
Scelidosaurus harrisonii (Dinosauria: Ornithischia)
from the Early Jurassic of Dorset, England: biology
and phylogenetic relationships, Zoological Journal
of the Linnean Society (2020). DOI:
10.1093/zoolinnean/zlaa061
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27) retrieved 29 August 2020 from https://phys.org/news/2020-08-dinosaur-skeleton-ready-closeup.html
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