New dinosaur species identified from fossils dug at a Surrey brickworks a quarter-century ago

Fossil bones that spent a quarter-century in storage at the Natural History Museum in London have turned out to belong to a dinosaur species unknown to science, researchers at the museum announced this week. The animal, a plant-eating relative of Iguanodon, has been named Paludohadros proudlovii, and its scientific debut carries an unusual personal note: the species name honors a brickworks manager who died shortly before the bones were dug out of the clay that had entombed them for 125 million years.

The description, published in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, was led by Ricardo Sacamoto, a doctoral student jointly based at the Natural History Museum and the University of São Paulo, with Susannah Maidment, a museum palaeontologist and honorary professor at the University of Birmingham, as senior author.

A new species hiding in plain sight

The bones were excavated in 2001 from wienerberger's Ewhurst brick and roof tile works in Surrey, in a layer of rock called the Weald Clay Formation, and donated soon after to the Natural History Museum. There they sat, catalogued but undescribed, until Sacamoto began working through the museum's iguanodontian holdings as part of his doctoral research. Reexamination of older museum drawers, some containing material collected as far back as the 1950s, turned up additional specimens of the same animal, giving the team enough material to establish it as a distinct genus and species rather than a variant of an already-known dinosaur.

Paludohadros proudlovii was an iguanodontian, the broad group of beaked, thumb-spiked plant-eaters that includes Iguanodon itself and gave the Weald Clay its reputation as one of Europe's richest Early Cretaceous dinosaur-bearing rock units. The individual described in the paper was roughly 5 meters, or about 16 feet, long and would have weighed an estimated 1.5 to 2 tonnes, in the range of a living rhinoceros. Its bones were not fully fused, a sign that it was still a juvenile when it died; the museum's researchers estimate a fully grown adult could have reached roughly twice that mass. The genus name draws on the Latin word for swamp, a nod to the muddy, low-lying wetland that covered what is now southern England about 125 million years ago.

Iguanodontians are typically identified by details of the jaw, teeth and vertebrae rather than by any single dramatic feature, which is part of why a new species can go unrecognized in a museum drawer for years. Sacamoto and Maidment's analysis rested on a combination of such anatomical traits in the Ewhurst material that distinguished it from Mantellisaurus, Iguanodon and the other iguanodontians already known from the Weald Clay and the geologically similar Wessex Formation on the Isle of Wight. The Weald Clay Formation itself formed in river deltas, lagoons and floodplains across what is now the Weald of southern England, a landscape that, in the Early Cretaceous, alternated between open water and the kind of soft, waterlogged ground that both preserved bone and gave the new genus its name.

A neighbor with sharper teeth

The new species was recovered from the same brickworks, and from rock only about 100 meters from the spot, where workers uncovered the skeleton of Baryonyx walkeri in 1983. That fish-eating theropod, also housed at the Natural History Museum and described in the museum's own online dinosaur directory, remains one of Britain's best-known dinosaur discoveries. The proximity gives researchers an unusually detailed snapshot of a single Early Cretaceous wetland community, predator and prey sharing the same patch of mud.

That relationship may be more direct than simple cohabitation. According to the museum, remains consistent with a baby iguanodontian were found associated with the Baryonyx material, raising the possibility that the carnivore fed on a young relative of Paludohadros, whether by hunting or scavenging. Researchers have not determined which.

"While Baryonyx is best known for eating fish, this dinosaur's last meal also included a baby iguanodontian," said Susannah Maidment, the paper's senior author.

Named for a life cut short

The species name, proudlovii, honors Will Proudlove, who rose through the ranks at the Ewhurst works to become its manager before he died at age 35, not long before the fossil that would eventually bear his name was excavated. His widow, Rachael Proudlove, and their children, Ellie and Matt, were invited to the dig at the time, and the family has followed the fossil's slow path to a formal scientific description over the past 25 years, according to the museum's account.

"We're absolutely overjoyed and honoured that Will's name and legacy will live on in this dinosaur," Rachael Proudlove said.

For Sacamoto, the find marks a milestone of his own. "Paludohadros is the first species I've ever named and I'm honoured to have been able to work on it," he said, according to the museum.

Part of a wider reshuffling

Paludohadros is the latest in a run of newly recognized iguanodontian species from southern England over the past few years, following Brighstoneus, Comptonatus and Istiorachis, all drawn from the Isle of Wight's Wealden rocks and reported by outlets including phys.org. Paleontologists say the surge reflects less a sudden burst of new dinosaurs than a more careful second look at bones that had been sitting in museum collections for decades, some since Victorian times. A 2023 redescription of Mantellisaurus, a mid-sized iguanodontian long used as a catch-all for ambiguous specimens from the region, gave researchers sharper anatomical criteria for telling superficially similar animals apart. Sacamoto and Maidment say that framework was essential to recognizing Paludohadros as distinct rather than folding it into an existing species.

Southern England has an outsized place in the history of dinosaur science: Megalosaurus and Iguanodon, two of the first dinosaurs ever named by scientists, were both described from fragments of English rock in the early 19th century, before the word "dinosaur" existed. Two centuries on, researchers say the same region, and in this case the same working quarry, is still adding new names to that early list, this time with the benefit of modern comparative anatomy and far larger museum collections than the Georgian scientists who named Iguanodon ever had.

The Weald Clay Formation, laid down in the river deltas and lagoons of what geologists call the Wealden Supergroup, has produced dinosaur fossils since the 19th century, but working quarries such as brickworks and clay pits continue to turn up new material as excavation exposes fresh rock faces. Smokejacks Brickworks, named in the paper's title as the specific quarry within the broader Ewhurst operation, has yielded fossils for more than four decades.

What comes next

Sacamoto said he plans to continue surveying the Natural History Museum's iguanodontian collections for further undescribed species as part of his doctoral work, raising the prospect that more Wealden dinosaurs remain to be formally named from bones already sitting in storage. The museum has not announced a timeline for any further publications from the collection. For now, the type specimen of Paludohadros proudlovii remains in the Natural History Museum's research collections in London, available to other scientists for comparison as the broader picture of Early Cretaceous life in southern England continues to be filled in, one drawer at a time.