World’s smallest dinosaur found in Sussex (From The Argus)

World’s smallest dinosaur found in Sussex

11:01am Wednesday 15th June 2011 in News By James Wallin

The world’s smallest dinosaur has been found in Sussex.

Nicknamed the Ashdown Maniraptoran, the foot-long, 7oz, dinosaur was uncovered at the site of a former brickworks in Bexhill.

Experts have now declared it is the smallest non-avian dinosaur ever discovered.

But this amazing discovery almost remained in the bedside drawer of an amateur fossil hunter.

Collector Dave Brockhurst, from Crowmere Avenue in Bexhill, stumbled upon a fossilised vertebrae while searching through the Ashdown Brickworks site, off Turkey Road, about two years ago.

The 51-year-old said: “I knew there was something about it that was different but I had no idea what it would turn out to be. I knew it wasn’t like the dwarf crocodile vertebrae's I’ve found before so took it home.

“It lay in my drawer for a while because I don’t know what to do with it. Then I eventually emailed Dr Steve Sweetman, who took it on.”

Dr Sweetman and his colleague Dr Darren Naish at the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Portsmouth analysed the vertebrae and concluded it was a previously undiscovered species.

The pair have now published a research paper on Mr Brockhurt’s discovery which has set the world of paleontology buzzing.

They believe the vertebrae comes froma dinosaur that lived between 100 million and 145 million years ago and was a small, feathered, bird-like dinosaur that walked on two feet.

It is likely to have been a carnivore and to have survived on a diet of small animals, including insects as well as leaves and fruit.

Mr Brockhurst, who has found more than a dozen dinosaur fossils at the same site, said: “I couldn’t believe it when they told me it was a completely new species. And then to find out it was possibly the world’s smallest dinosaur. Amazing.