Dinosaur bone discovered on Scottish island the 1st of its kind in the country
Paleontologist Elsa Panciroli was running to catch up with her colleagues when she spotted the rare fossil
A rare dinosaur bone from the Middle Jurassic was discovered in Scotland, thanks to the keen eye of a local paleontologist.
Elsa Panciroli got separated from her colleagues while searching for fossils on the Scottish Isle of Eigg. She was hopping from boulder to boulder on the shoreline to catch up with the rest of the team when something caught her eye.
"I suddenly realized the boulder I had just hopped onto and run past, it had something in it. But I wasn't sure quite what," Panciroli, who is a paleontologist at National Museums Scotland, told As It Happens guest host Helen Mann.
"So I turned around, went back to look, and it was a dinosaur bone sticking out of the boulder on the shoreline I'd just literally stepped on."
Her discovery turned out to be a 48-centimetre dinosaur bone, belonging to a species that has never been seen in Scotland before.
1st dinosaur on Eigg
Panciroli was so surprised to find the dinosaur bone, she says she downplayed her discovery to her colleagues at first.
"I was a bit reluctant to say the d-word, so I just kept saying I found something," she said. "And eventually they teased [it] out of me, and of course the moment I said 'dinosaur' everyone ... wanted to come and have a look."
Hundreds of people have likely walked over the boulder without noticing anything, she said, and finding the fossil was a matter of luck as much as training.
"I think a lot of the time for people who search for fossils, it's about pattern recognition. You're looking to recognize something. And it was almost unconscious, because I wasn't looking anymore; I was running."
Panciroli said Eigg has been extensively studied, and the purpose of the trip was to look for fossils seen on the island before, like those of marine reptiles and fish.
The researchers never expected to find signs of something as big as a dinosaur — and it turns out that Panciroli's discovery is even rarer than that.
Rare fossil from the Middle Jurassic
After months of extensive tests on the bone, its owner was established to be a young stegosaurian dinosaur from the Middle Jurassic period. This is the first time this type of dinosaur and a fossil this old have been found in Scotland.
"It's 166 million years old, and this is a time when fossils — globally speaking, not just in Scotland — are very, very rare," Panciroli said.
"So just finding it in the first place is really quite significant."
It's also the first time a dinosaur fossil has been found on Eigg; all other dino fossils in Scotland were discovered on the Isle of Skye.
The newfound bone was likely a back lower leg bone of a stegosaurian dinosaur, a large quadruped species with distinctive plates on the back.
Previously, only fossils from two different types of dinosaurs — "the big, long-necked, very heavy dinosaurs" and "the meat-eating dinosaurs that walk on two legs" — have been found in Scotland, Panciroli said.
Researchers will now continue looking for fossils on Eigg and Skye in hopes of building a more complete picture of the ecosystem of that time period.
"We already know that there were also mammals at this time, the very earliest ones, but also things like salamanders, crocodiles, turtles — so we can even look at food chains. It really is only the beginning of research," Panciroli said.
The researcher also said she was happy to find something so close to home. "It's always lovely to find something in your home country. I think I expected that I would probably have to travel abroad to look for something like this, so it's a big surprise."
Written by Olsy Sorokina. Interview produced by Jeanne Armstrong.
