• The only complete dinosaur skeleton ever found out experienced been sitting in storage for 160 several years prior to it obtained the consideration it deserved.
• In excess of the past a few yrs, researchers have pieced with each other the skeleton and learned a large amount about its history.
• The animal, a Scelidosaurus, was intently linked to ankylosaurs. 

About the generations, researchers have identified several, several dinosaur fossils. We have learned about hundreds of species that lived millions and hundreds of thousands of years ago thanks to all those fossilized bones… but how several entire dinosaur skeletons would you guess there are? A hundred? Probably a thousand? A lot more?

Believe it or not, the overwhelming the greater part of skeletons uncovered are incomplete in just one way or one more. Researchers have to piece with each other components from numerous specimens to get the full picture of what a dinosaur seemed like. And when it comes to entire dinosaur skeletons, there’s just one particular. Sure, a single.

The dinosaur, which is a Scelidosaurus, is not exactly a new come across. In reality, it is been about a century and a fifty percent considering that it was to start with uncovered on the southern coastline of England. It was learned in an space that is now nicely identified for its amazing age, with rocks relationship back just about 200 million several years.

When it was very first uncovered, it was sent to the British Museum under the treatment of a man named Richard Owen. As the University of Cambridge explains, Owen penned a couple of papers about the skeleton and still left it at that. He didn’t attempt to piece it together or even further review it and moved on to no matter what was next.

“Over the earlier three many years, Dr. David Norman from Cambridge’s Section of Earth Sciences has been operating to complete the operate which Owen started off, getting ready a comprehensive description and organic examination of the skeleton of Scelidosaurus, the authentic of which is stored at the Pure Heritage Museum in London, with other specimens at Bristol Town Museum and the Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge,” the university suggests in a push launch.

With yrs of added analysis carried out, we now know that the animal was similar to the ankylosaurs, which were being protected in thick boney armor and sported clubbed tails. Additionally, the new work has resulted in the skeleton eventually remaining assembled for the initially time because it was uncovered.

“It is unfortunate that these kinds of an important dinosaur, identified at these a significant time in the early research of dinosaurs, was under no circumstances adequately explained,” Dr. David Norman of Cambridge’s Section of Earth Sciences mentioned in a assertion. “It has now – at previous! – been described in detail and provides lots of new and sudden insights regarding the biology of early dinosaurs and their fundamental associations. It seems a shame that the get the job done was not performed earlier but, as they say, improved late than never ever.”