Small-Bodied Herbivorous Dinosaur Unearthed in Scotland | Sci.News
The specimen is the first and most complete partial dinosaur skeleton currently known from Scotland, according to a team of paleontologists led by National Museums Scotland.
An artist’s impression of an ornithischian dinosaur. Image credit: Peter Trusler.
The newly-described specimen dates from the Middle Jurassic period, approximately 166 million years ago.
“Dinosaurs from the Triassic and Early Jurassic were generally small, bipedal carnivores and omnivores, but by the Late Jurassic they had radiated into a highly diverse range of species that included some of the largest terrestrial vertebrates to ever walk the Earth,” said Dr. Elsa Panciroli, a paleobiologist at National Museums Scotland, and her colleagues.
“This major diversification and radiation of dinosaurs appears to have primarily occurred during the Middle Jurassic, making dinosaurs from this time interval critical to our understanding of the drivers of this radiation.”
“However, Middle Jurassic dinosaur fossils are exceptionally poorly known and globally rare,” they added.
“Consequently, the early evolutionary histories and major diversifications of most dinosaur groups remain obscure.”
“New dinosaur finds from the Middle Jurassic are therefore highly significant for our understanding of the development of dinosaur-dominated ecosystems.”
The 166-million-year-old skeleton of an ornithischian dinosaur from the Kilmaluag Formation, the Isle of Skye. Image credit: Panciroli et al., doi: 10.1017/S1755691024000148.
The partial dinosaur skeleton was first discovered in 1973, but was collected only in 2018.
“The specimen consists of numerous bones and bone fragments that appear to be associated and lying on a single bedding plane within an area of approximately 60 cm by 40 cm,” the paleontologists said.
The skeleton was found in exposures of the Kilmaluag Formation north of the village of Elgol on the Isle of Skye.
It comprises the most complete fossil of its kind in Scotland, and its original discovery pre-dates the first reported dinosaur fossils from Skye.
“The Middle Jurassic of Scotland is increasingly well represented by the fossil discoveries from the Kilmaluag Formation, making it of global importance in our knowledge of this time period in tetrapod evolution,” the researchers said.
“It is also the most complete definite dinosaur known from Scotland, despite being broken into fragments, with a partial ilium, neural arch and portions of ribs and other pieces of larger elements.”
The Middle Jurassic dinosaur was likely a member of a clade of ornithischian dinosaurs called Ornithopoda.
“If the specimen does represent an ornithischian, as tentatively suggested from the partial ilium and histological sectioning, it represents the geologically youngest known occurrence in Scotland, and first from the Kilmaluag Formation,” the scientists said.
The team’s paper was published in the journal Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
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Elsa Panciroli et al. The first and most complete dinosaur skeleton from the Middle Jurassic of Scotland. Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, published online March 6, 2025; doi: 10.1017/S1755691024000148
