A prehistoric backbone dug up in Hastings more than a century ago has just been revealed as that of a new dinosaur. It was not the first such discovery in Sussex.

Andy Dickenson reports on the monsters that once roamed the county.

Deep within the bowels of the Booth Museum of Natural History in Dyke Road, Brighton, lie thousands of dinosaur bones.

They sit in dusty cabinets just like the one in which computer programmer Mike Taylor uncovered the world's first recorded xenoposeidon bone.

The PhD student spotted the sauropod backbone, originally dug up in Ecclesbourne Glen, near Hastings, in the 1890s, locked in a case in the Natural History Museum in London.

It turned out to be from an unknown family of the beast, believed to look like a brontosaurus, and was recognised by the British Palaeontological Association this week.

Many of the dinosaur pieces in the offices of the Booth Museum belong to the George Holmes collection.

A Victorian Quaker, Holmes followed in the footsteps of Gideon Mantell, the famous dinosaur discoverer from Lewes, unearthing bones from the quarries of Horsham.

John Cooper, chairman of the Brighton and Hove Geological Society, said: "He was one of the many people making these sorts of discoveries and they didn't really know what they were finding.

"Small ends of bones, for example, that were not always easy to identify in terms of what the bone was, let alone what sort of animal it was from.

"They knew they were looking at reptiles but they were huge bones by modern reptile standards. It was astonishing. They would quite often call them iguanodon bones because, at the time, it was the only dinosaur that had been named apart from megalosaurus."

Mantell discovered the third species of dinosaur to be identified, the hylaeosaurus, when he unearthed a group of bones in 1832, reputedly in Tilgate Forest, Crawley. The specimen, encased in the limestone block in which it was found, now resides in the Natural History Museum.

Mr Cooper said: "Mantell was notorious for jealously guarding the places where he made his discoveries and called everything in the area Tilgate Forest so I'd take that with a pinch of salt.

"We don't know where he actually got it from but we know he did a lot of his work around Cuckfield. He found a collection of bones but they were spiky, almost curved like a scimitar sword, that he guessed were part of its back."

Mantell's find is still considered one of the best specimens of the monster, which dates back about 135 million years.

He estimated the hylaeosaurus, meaning "forest lizard", was about 25ft long but nowadays experts believe it was about half that size, with three long spines on its shoulder, two at the hips and three rows of armour running along its back.

Mr Cooper said: "It was a very uncertain science and the only way you could be sure of what you were finding was if you eventually found a complete skeleton.

"In 1878 I think it was, a whole herd of dinosaurs was found in a coal mine in Belgium. The coal had run out but they kept digging into sandstone and found all these bones of complete iguanodons."

From a plethora of shelves and drawers Mr Cooper pulled out bones labelled iguanodon ribs and thigh bones as well as a hylaeosaurus tail bone found in Hawkesbourne, near Horsham.

He said: "There's been a rich vein of finds in Sussex but it's all down to the right rocks. A lot of Sussex rocks, like chalk, are deposits from the sea so we don't find dinosaur bones there. But there are lots of rocks in Sussex formed about 140 or 120 million years ago that were formed on sandbanks, river deltas - basically land deposits - where plants grew, where crocodiles swam, where insects buzzed and where dinosaurs were eating trees and each other.

"The rocks are known as the Wealden rocks and they are centred on the High Weald, maybe Battle, Tunbridge Wells and in a horseshoe shape that opens out on to the coast so there are cliffs - Fairlight Glen, Ecclesbourne Glen, Bexhill, Hastings - where you can find dinosaur bones and footprints.

"I found an iguanodon footprint in Bexhill. Every year somewhere in Sussex someone is finding a dinosaur bone. Only very rarely do you find an accumulation of bones but they have happened around Horsham, Rudgwick, Hastings. I've seen them come up near Hailsham, Keymer near Ditchling, Haywards Heath.

"Much of West Sussex gets missed out unfortunately in terms of dinosaurs but there's plenty in the east of the region to keep geologists busy."

A display room at the museum highlights other Sussex discoveries, from a fossilised impression of a prehistoric dragonfly to the tooth of a woolly mammoth and larger dinosaur bones.

Mr Cooper said: "I always emphasise to children that the thing they are touching was once inside the leg of a dinosaur. Sussex is dinosaur country. Ultimately if you've got the right information, taken the right precautions and you know where to go, then you just need to use your eyes. It's not impossible to walk along the coast of Fairlight or Hastings, to look among the rocks there and to find fossils.

"Or, like Mike Taylor, you could be looking at a collection like ours and recognise that a bone is something special, realise that it's a new record of a dinosaur. Even though it was discovered in the 19th century."

  • Watch our video on hunting for dinosaurs =here