The first complete dinosaur skeleton ever identified
has finally been studied in detail and found its place in the dinosaur family tree.
The skeleton of this dinosaur, called Scelidosaurus,
was collected more than 160 years ago on west Dorset's Jurassic Coast.
This remarkable specimen was sent to Richard Owen at the British Museum,
the man who invented the word dinosaur.
He published two short papers on its anatomy, but many details were left unrecorded.
Owen did not reconstruct the animal as it might have appeared in life
and made no attempt to understand its relationship to other known dinosaurs of the time.
Over the past three years, Dr David Norman from Cambridge's Department of Earth Sciences
has been working to finish the job 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.
The results of Norman's work, reconstruct what Scelidosaurus looked like in life,
and
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 it is an ancestor of the ankylosaurs alone.
Norman said that It’s unfortunate that such an important dinosaur,
discovered at such a critical time in the early study of dinosaurs,
was never properly described," well, It has now - at last!
