World Heritage Museums

Opening Times Times may vary at present.

Buy Tickets Latest News

The First Dinosaurs May Have Had A UK Origin

Published: 23rd Mar 2017

A new theory suggests dinosaurs may have originated from the Northern Hemisphere, an area, which may possibly have been Britain.

For 130 years dinosaurs have been classed into two groups, Ornithischia and Saurischia. However in the first re-evaluation since then, a number of conclusions have been revealed that show what we thought about how dinosaurs evolved and where they came from may be wrong.

Published in the journal Nature, this reassessment reveals a number of misconceptions:

  • Meat-eating dinosaurs such as T-rex and Velociraptor may have been wrongly classified.
  • Dinosaurs emerged 15 million years earlier than previously thought.
  • Fossil evidence suggests that the origin of the dinosaurs occurred further north than currently thought. An area now thought to be around where the UK was.

How these new findings and theories will shape our perspective is yet to be told but we look forward to seeing what this can hold to the future and how it might change our perspective of the evolution of the dinosaurs.

You can read the full journal article here:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v543/n7646/full/nature21700.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-39305750