A student has discovered a previously unknown species of dinosaur after its backbone sat gathering dust in a museum for more than 100 years.

Mike Taylor spotted the sauropod bone, originally dug up just outside Hastings, locked in a cabinet in the Natural History Museum.

It turned out to be from a completely new family of the beast, believed to be like a brontosaurus and recognisable by its large body, long neck and small head.

Mr Taylor now believes more dino bones could be buried across Sussex.

The bone was dug up in Ecclesbourne Glen, near Hastings, in the early 1890s by fossil collector Philip James Rufford.

It was given a brief description and then left untouched for the next 113 years until Mr Taylor, a part-time PhD student at Portsmouth University, found it.

He said: "I was down in the museum's collection searching for two other bones but as I went through a cabinet this one just leapt out at me.

"I've spent the last five years doing nothing but looking at sauropod vertebrae so I immediately realised it was something strange."

Sauropods were herbivores that roamed the earth around 140 million years ago.

The largest were as big as a whale and weighed up to 70 tonnes - about as heavy as 12 elephants.

This new sauropod has been named xenoposeidon which means roughly "alien sauropod".

Mr Taylor, 39, a computer programmer who is married with three children, said: "It's very exciting for all sorts of reasons, ultimately for the sheer science of it but also because of all the things you can do in science this is something your mother can understand.

"We know Rufford did pretty much all his collecting in Fairlight and Ecclesbourne Glen.

"It's a bit of a detective story but that's certainly where I'd go looking for more of it. For me the best possible outcome would be to find more of this particular dinosaur.

"It would be fabulous if people would go there looking for more but it would be very bad if they tried to excavate without knowing what they're doing.

"It really is specialist work and it's all too easy for someone who doesn't know what they're doing to do much more harm than good."

Mr Taylor and fellow palaeontologist Dr Darren Naish know the preserved bone came from near the hip area of the dinosaur.

From this they have made an informed guess about the size and shape of the animal, and they think they have established why xenoposeidon is not only a new species but probably a new family of dinosaur.

Mr Taylor added: "It was quickly apparent that my first instinct had been right - this bone had belonged to a previously unknown species.

"The difference between this specimen and other sauropod vertebrae is sufficiently great that I concluded that it could not be placed in any existing species or genus.

"It's a big group of dinosaurs. We know what we have is a sauropod but we think it represents a whole new sub-group.

"It's a bit like a paleontologist 50 million years in the future digging up a dog and a lion and a tiger and then suddenly discovering a bear."

Sussex is a rich hunting ground for dinosaur remains but because no precise record of where the bone was dug up was kept, palaeontologists cannot go looking for more of the skeleton.

John Cooper, of the Brighton and Hove Geological Society, said: "This in itself is a rare find but dinosaur bones are still found in places like Fairlight Cove. Even footprints have been found.

"But if anyone does find something please call us or the Hastings Geological Society because we know how to excavate the bones properly without damaging them."

Xenoposeidon will be named and described in today's (Thursday) edition of Palaeontology, the journal of the British Palaeontological Association.

Have you ever found a fossil? Tell us about it below.