The Museum That Holds Sophie Just Found a New Dinosaur in a Drawer

London’s Natural History Museum bought a battered skull fragment from a collector’s widow in May 1924 and put it in a drawer. This month a team led by Cassius Morrison took it out, looked again, and named a new dinosaur: Invictibellatrix amberina, a tiger-sized predator from the Isle of Wight, about 120 million years old — and the first megaraptoran ever found in Europe, a group otherwise known mostly from the Southern Hemisphere. All they have is one beach-rolled braincase, and the authors are careful to say so.

That is the same museum where Sophie stands — the Stegosaurus we took out of the ground at Shell, Wyoming in 2004. I’ve stood under her mount with Dr. Paul Barrett. What strikes me about this story is the hundred years. The fossil didn’t change; the people looking at it did. Cataloged, numbered, kept dry — and a century later it answered a question nobody had thought to ask in 1924.

It’s the argument for documenting everything in the field and keeping it, even when nobody has a use for it yet. A drawer is only a dead end until someone opens it.

Source: Morrison et al., Royal Society Open Science, October 14, 2026. Read the original for the specifics.