The first complete dinosaur skeleton ever identified has finally been studied in detail and found its place in the dinosaur family tree, completing a project that began more than a century and a half ago. Credit: John Sibbick
Phys.org has a story about a complete dinosaur found on west Dorset's Jurassic Coast. The skeleton was collected 160 years ago was sent to Richard Owen at the British Museum. The animal lived around 193 million years ago during the early Jurassic Period. The new research was published in the journal Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society (2020).
The first complete dinosaur skeleton ever identified has finally been studied in detail and found its place in the dinosaur family tree, completing a project that began more than a century and a half ago.
The skeleton of this dinosaur, called Scelidosaurus, was collected more than 160 years ago on west Dorset's Jurassic Coast. The rocks in which it was fossilised are around 193 million years old, close to the dawn of the Age of Dinosaurs.
This remarkable specimen—the first complete dinosaur skeleton ever recovered—was sent to Richard Owen at the British Museum, the man who invented the word dinosaur.
So, what did Owen do with this find? 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. In short, he 're-buried' it in the literature of the time, and so it has remained ever since: known, yet obscure and misunderstood.
