With a new year comes new dinosaurs: 2014 is barely warm and yetfrom Argentina andfrom Mongolia have already been named. It seems somewhat inevitable that new and apparently exciting dinosaurs come from Asia, the Americas, or even Australian and Antarctica, but the UK is not without its dinosaurs. True, the numbers are rather lower, but given the size of the UK and our distinct lack of deserts and badlands that are prime dinosaur hunting grounds, in fact the collection is impressive in terms of the breadth, depth and number of specimens and their importance.

At least 25 (and probably more, it does depend who you ask) non-avian dinosaur genera are known from these shores. They include representatives of a large number of dinosaur groups, and come from across the range of the Mesozoic from around 200m to 95m years ago. You might be aware that the south coast and the Isle of Wight are particular hotspots for dinosaur finds, but their fossil remains have been recovered from (among others) Leicestershire, Dorset, Somerset, Glamorgan, Northampton, North Yorkshire, Skye, Oxfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Sussex, Buckinghamshire, Rutland, Wiltshire, Norfolk, Aberdeenshire and Berkshire. Bones have even been found in cities with the important Triassic animal Thecodontosaurus having first been recovered from a quarry in Bristol (for those that know the city, it’s at the top of Whiteladies Road).

Most obviously, the British dinosaur collective (now there’s a band name waiting to happen) includes the first three dinosaurs named, and indeed Richard Owen’s original definition of the Dinosauria was based on Megalosaurus, Iguanodon, and the far less well-known Hylaeosaurus. In short, the very origins of research on dinosaurs and our understanding of them in terms of their biology as living animals, evolution and even the recognition of the fact that they existed, began in the UK. These three genera included representatives of what we now know to be two of the three great dinosaur groups (the theropods and ornithischians) but the third (the sauropodomorphs) were not far behind.



The lower jaw of Megalosaurus, the first named fossil of a dinosaur. Now on display in Oxford. Photograph: David Hone

Both Cetiosaurus and Cetiosauriscus were soon added to the growing roster of dinosaurs as new and ever more interesting and odd forms were identified. During the early years of dinosaur research in the middle part of the 19th century each new find of course made a colossal difference to the total known and added much information, but discoveries have continued through to the present and many specimens that were not considered of great significance have turned out to be more important than originally suspected.

For example, in 1848, Gideon Mantell described a jaw of a dinosaur that he assigned to the genus Iguanodon (a genus he had named), but in 2010 this was identified as a new animal – Kukufeldia – showing that there was more to this specimen than originally suspected. Indeed, the relatives of Iguanodon are rather plentiful in English rocks and the group is undergoing something of a renaissance with a number of new animals named in recent years including Mantellisaurus and the wonderfully named Barilium. Similarly, the oddly crested carnivore Proceratosaurus was something of an enigma when found in Gloucestershire in the first years of the 20th century, but in recent years it has been recognised as an early branch of the tyrannosaurs, and this representation is increased with Eotyrannus from the Isle of Wight, named in 2001 and Juratyrant in 2012, making the UK a most important source of information on the early part of the evolution of the clade that eventually gave the world Tyrannosaurus.

Of more obvious and immediate note was the discovery of Baryonyx. This large carnivore was named in 1986 and was fairly clearly part of the group that contains the famous Spinosaurus. While this latter animal has become familiar to many as a result of the last Jurassic Park film, it is an animal we still know very little about. The first remains of this genus were found in Egypt in the early 1900s and taken to Munich, but were destroyed by allied bombing in the last months of the second world war. When Baryonyx was discovered, it was the first good material seen for decades and is still the best described genus of this group. On top of the quality of the specimen, Baryonyx also proved to have the remains of a fish and the bones of a baby dinosaur in its stomach providing some of the best evidence for the diet of carnivorous dinosaurs known.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Description of the discovery of Baryonyx by Dr Angela Milner of the Natural History Museum, London, who named the genus with Dr Alan Charig in 1986.

Although Baryonyx is known from a pretty good skeleton, most of the animals named here are represented by far from complete remains. At least one though is very special, a specimen of the armoured dinosaur Scelidosaurus from the Jurassic coast is arguably one of the best dinosaur skeletons in the world. The wonderful thing about this specimen is not just that it is nearly complete and the bones are preserved in superb condition, but that the dozens and dozens of armour plates and spikes are all there and in position. Often even the best preserved armoured dinosaurs have lost a few bits and pieces of the protective coverings, or if they are there, they have shifted and moved around. In this case, they are beautifully laid out in neat rows and show the patterns these pieces took in life.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A cast of the magnificent Scelidosaurus specimen that preserves the animal's bony armour. Photograph: /flickr

I’ve mentioned more than a dozen different genera from the UK, but there are still plenty more important and interesting finds such as the early armoured dinosaurs Polacanthus and Dacentrurus, the carnivores Neovenator and Eustreptospondylus as well as the fragmentary but enigmatic ridge-backed Becklespinax, the sauropods Camelotia and Cardiodon and small ornithischians Hypsilophodon and Cumnoria. This covers just the bony specimens, and footprints of dinosaurs are also known from the south coast, Yorkshire and Scotland. Not only this, but more Baryonyx material has recently been found, one of the smallest dinosaurs known is British (if represented by a single bone) and was only identified in 2011, and ongoing studies suggest there are both new forms being found and that more species are hidden in existing collections under old names.



While we have yet to find anything on these shores quite as spectacular as the Argentinian giants or feathered dinosaurs from China, British dinosaur discoveries are in rude health. The material that has already been recovered and described gives us important insight into many aspects of the lives of dinosaurs – in particular we have quite a set from the Middle Jurassic period, a time from which dinosaurs are otherwise rather rare worldwide. Thus despite the deserved attention many foreign finds receive, we should not overlook those from our own shores as many even fragmentary remains have much to tell us about the lost worlds of these animals.