New species discovered is the oldest meat-eating dinosaur found in UK

Scientists have discovered a new species which is distantly related to Tyrannosaurus rex and they say is the oldest carnivorous dinosaur found in the UK. This new species is the size of a chicken and is called Pendraig milnerae.

Pendraig in middle Welsh means “chief dragon” and milnerae is in honour of the late Angela Milner, a stalwart of the Natural History Museum’s dinosaur gallery and a researcher and deputy keeper of palaeontology at the museum for more than 30 years.

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As per the journal Royal Society Open Science, Pendraig milnerae is a"new small-sized coelophysoid theropod from the Late Triassic of Wales" that roamed the UK over 200 million years ago.

Theropods are two-legged carnivores with hollow bones and three-toed feet, including T. Rex.

The Natural History Museum in London, in a news release said that scientists mistook the fossils for those of an already-identified dinosaur species. However, the re-identification helped in further analysing the species.

Dr Stephan Spiekman, a research fellow at the Museum and the paper's lead author in the press release said, "There is no obvious character that set this species apart. It has a certain combination of several characters that are unique amongst its group, which showed to us it was clearly a new species."

The scientists also said that they do not know whether the fossils are small because they are from a juvenile or whether they are those of a small adult specimen.

Richard Butler, a co-author on a paper on the dinosaur and professor of palaeobiology at the University of Birmingham was quoted by the Guardian as saying, "Dinosaur discoveries are really rare in Wales, and this is only the third dinosaur species known from the country. It’s very exciting to learn more about the dinosaurs that lived here in the UK during the Triassic, right at the dawn of dinosaur evolution.”