New species of dinosaur discovered after 40 years in the basement of the museum…

Named after the site (Brightstone, on the Isle of Wight) and the discoverer (Keith Symonds), the Stone Symonds Tower is said to date to the early Cretaceous period, about 125 million years ago. The shining stone is estimated to be about 8 meters long and weigh about 1,000 kilograms.

Amateur archaeologist Symonds originally found the bones on the Isle of Wight in 1978, then they were stored in the local museum. It was not thoroughly studied until forty years later by scientists, which has now led to the discovery that it is a previously undiscovered species. “It’s very common these days for new species to be found in museum vaults rather than in nature,” said Jeremy Lockwood of the University of Portsmouth.

Lockwood was researching the island’s herbivorous dinosaurs when he came across the bones and decided they were a new species, thanks to the distinctive nose of the bright stone. Other herbivores such as the iguanodon have a flat nose, while the gallstone has a rounded nose. The bright stone also had more teeth, as plants were rare in the early Cretaceous period. So the species also had to eat hard-to-digest plants like needles and ferns.