A new genus and species of iguanodontian dinosaur being named Comptonatus chasei has been described by University of Portsmouth Ph.D. student Jeremy Lockwood and his colleagues.
Comptonatus chasei roamed Earth during the Early Cretaceous epoch, some 125 million years ago.
“This animal would have been around a ton, about as big as a large male American bison,” Lockwood said.
“And evidence from fossil footprints found nearby shows it was likely to be a herding animal, so possibly large herds of these heavy dinosaurs may have been thundering around if spooked by predators on the floodplains over 120 million years ago.”
Comptonatus chasei was a member of Iguanodontia, a highly successful group of ornithischian dinosaurs, probably originating during the Late Middle Jurassic.
“Comptonatus chasei is a fantastic dinosaur specimen: one of the most complete to be found in the UK in a century,” said Dr. Susannah Maidment, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum, London.
“The specimen, which is younger than Brighstoneus but older than Mantellisaurus (two iguandontian dinosaurs closely related to Comptonatus chasei) demonstrate fast rates of evolution in iguandontian dinosaurs during this time period, and could help us understand how ecosystems recovered after a putative extinction event at the end of the Jurassic period.”
The fossilized remains of Comptonatus chasei were found in the Wessex Formation on the Isle of Wight in 2013 by fossil collector Nick Chase.
“Comptonatus chasei represents one of the most complete iguanodontian dinosaurs, including cranial elements, found in Britain,” the paleontologists said.
Despite only four new dinosaur species being described on the Isle of Wight in the whole of the 1900s, there have been eight new species named in the last five years.
“This really is a remarkable find,” Lockwood said.
“It helps us understand more about the different types of dinosaurs that lived in England in the Early Cretaceous.”
“This adds to recent research that shows that Wessex was one of the world’s most diverse ecosystems.”
The findings were published this week in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology.
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Jeremy A. F. Lockwood et al. 2024. Comptonatus chasei, a new iguanodontian dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous Wessex Formation of the Isle of Wight, southern England. Journal of Systematic Palaeontology 22 (1); doi: 10.1080/14772019.2024.2346573
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