A new dinosaur was hiding in a museum for 25 years — now it carries a quarry manager's name

The bones were dug out of a Surrey clay quarry in 2001 and donated to the Natural History Museum in London, where they sat in the collections for 25 years labelled as a familiar kind of plant-eating dinosaur. A fresh, close look has now shown they are something new entirely: a whole new genus and species, named Paludohadros proudlovii. The animal lived about 125 million years ago in the muddy wetlands of southern England, was about 5 metres (about 16 feet) long and weighed 1.5 to 2 tonnes — roughly rhino-sized, and still young, so adults may have grown twice as big. It was found just 100 metres (about 330 feet) from the spot that yielded Baryonyx, one of Britain's most famous dinosaurs. The species name honours Will Proudlove, the quarry manager who loved the fossils his works uncovered and who died at 35, shortly before this one was found. Lead researcher Ricardo Sacamoto now plans to work through the museum's older dinosaur collections, looking for more species hiding in plain sight.