Fossils of a small meat-eating dinosaur discovered in a quarry near Cardiff offer the earliest evidence ever found in the UK of theropods, a hugely diverse groups of dinosaurs that includes T. rex, Velociraptor听补苍诲 all birds.
This animal, which has been named Pendraig milnerae, lived between 200 and 215 million years ago, during the Late Triassic Epoch. It was unearthed in a quarry called Pant-y-ffynnon located north-west of Cardiff in the 1950s, but the fossil was lost for decades in the collections at the Natural History Museum in London.
鈥淵ou could look at it as like a chicken with a very long tail in terms of size,鈥� says at the Natural History Museum. 鈥淭his animal is from the very early evolution of the dinosaurs, from a time period when dinosaurs were not yet the dominant group on land, but they were already diversifying.鈥�
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When P. milnerae was alive, the region surrounding Cardiff was probably made up of a series of small tropical islands. It would probably have been one of the main predators on its island, which is why Spiekman and his colleagues thought the name Pendraig 鈥� meaning 鈥渃hief dragon鈥� in Middle Welsh 鈥� was suitable.
The species name milnerae was chosen to honour Angela Milner, a palaeontologist who worked at the Natural History Museum for more than 30 years and who rediscovered the specimen in a drawer containing crocodile rather than dinosaur material. .
鈥淚t belongs to a group that was sort of nearly globally distributed, so it鈥檚 not a huge surprise to find one here, but at the same time it鈥檚 still nice to have one,鈥� says at University College London. 鈥淧reviously, there were only two of these elsewhere in Europe, so it鈥檚 a kind of geographic data point and fills in a gap in that sense.鈥�
Royal Society Open Science
