The night-walkers of Uganda

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Untouched on a shelf for 113 years: 
a dusty bone of the dinosaur no one 
knew existed
Ian Sample, science correspondent 
November 15, 2007
Part-time dinosaur enthusiast Mike Taylor was 
looking in the shelves of the Natural History 
Museum in London when he found a dusty fossil. 
He immediately realized that the label on the fossil 
was wrong. 
For 113 years the museum thought that the fossil 
was from a common North American dinosaur. 
In fact, what Mike Taylor had found was a new 
dinosaur that lived 140 million years ago. 
The dinosaur, now named Xenoposeidon 
proneneukus, belonged to a family of sauropods. It 
was about the size of an elephant and weighed up 
to 7.5 tonnes.
Mike Taylor found the fossil last January while 
he was doing some research. He was looking at 
bones to learn more about sauropods, the largest 
creatures ever to walk the Earth. Taylor was visiting 
the museum as part of his research at Portsmouth 
University.
Behind grey metal doors in a dark basement in 
the museum are rows of shelves. Many of the 
museum’s 90 million fossils can be found there. 
Taylor found the spine fossil on a shelf, just a few 
floors beneath the offices of some of the most 
respected palaeontologists in Britain.
“I was looking for two particular specimens, but 
before I got to those, I found this thing with a label 
that called it something that it was not,” he said. 
“I took it over to the bench, laid it down gently on 
sandbags, and started looking at it.
The bone, a vertebra from near the hip of the 
creature, was discovered in Ecclesbourne Glen, 
near Hastings, in the early 1890s, by a fossil 
collector called Philip James Rufford.
It was studied briefly by the English 
palaeontologist Richard Lydekker, and then kept 
at the museum. It was labelled as “Morosaurus 
brevis” once a common sauropod in North 
America.
Taylor noticed features in the bone that made it 
clear it was from a sauropod. For example, it had 
large air holes that made the skeleton lighter, so 
that the giants could walk. But in other ways it was 
very different.
Apart from its size, Taylor says it is almost 
impossible to know anything else about
the dinosaur.
There are three major groups of dinosaurs. The 
most frightening were the carnivorous theropods, 
among them Tyrannosaurus rex and the 
velociraptor. A second group is the ornithischians, 
such as the triceratops and stegosaurus. But 
the sauropods, which include the herbivorous 
diplodocus and brachiosaurus, were the largest 
of them all; they could weigh up to 70 tonnes and 
some were nearly 30 metres long.
Angela Milner, a palaeontologist at the museum, 
said the Xenoposeidon was probably not the only 
undiscovered species in the collection.
“Because the collections here are so large, some 
specimens have not been looked at for many, 
many years,” she said. “When people look at 
things using modern techniques, they sometimes 
make new discoveries and that’s why museum 
collections are so important.”
© Guardian News & Media 2007
First published in The Guardian, 15/11/07