Ireland's first dinosaurs have been found: no, not the aul boys down the pub who think that everyone should still play 4-4-2, actual real dinosaurs. Well, fossils of actual dinosaurs.
Roger Byrne, an amateur fossil enthusiast, found the bones in Islandmagee in Co. Antrim and you can certainly insert your own joke about there already being a load of dinosaurs knocking around that particular part of the North. He has subsequently died, but before his death, he handed his findings over to the Ulster Museum.
They were thought to be dinosaur fossils, but that was not proven until the findings were announced recently, when a team of researchers from the University of Portsmouth and Queens University Belfast. "These are the first dinosaur remains reported from anywhere in Ireland and some of the most westerly in Europe, and they are among only a small number of dinosaurs known from the Hettangian Stage," said the report. The Hettangian Stage is one of latest parts of the Jurassic Period, around 200 million years ago.
Advert
Amazingly (well, I was amazed at least), Ireland has never actually had any dinosaur fossils before, which is doubly amazing because we're right next to the UK, where they find fossils all the time.
"This is a hugely significant discovery," said Dr Mike Simms, a curator and palaeontologist at National Museums Northern Ireland. "The great rarity of such fossils here is because most of Ireland's rocks are the wrong age for dinosaurs, either too old or too young, making it nearly impossible to confirm dinosaurs existed on these shores. The two dinosaur fossils that Roger Byrne found were perhaps swept out to sea, alive or dead, sinking to the Jurassic seabed where they were buried and fossilised."
Just 1% of all the rocks on the whole island of Ireland are old enough to have been around at the time of dinosaurs, which explains the paucity of fossils. The fossils have not yet been conclusively identified, but some think that they might belong to a Scelidosaurus dinosaur, which was known to have been present in Dorset in England at the correct time.