Mantellisaurus Skeleton
Early Cretaceous, about 125 million years ago
In one of the ground floor bays of Hintze Hall stands a dinosaur that is remarkable not for its size but for how much of it is real. Mantellisaurus was a plant eater of the Early Cretaceous, a relative of the more famous Iguanodon, and this specimen is one of the most complete dinosaur skeletons ever found in Britain. Almost every bone you see was dug from the cliffs of the Isle of Wight, and the animal is displayed in a low, four legged walking pose with its long tail balancing a small, horse like head.
Look closely at the hands. The thumb ends in a stout conical spike, the feature that once caused Gideon Mantell to place a similar bone on the nose of Iguanodon like a rhinoceros horn. The three middle fingers are bound together with hoof like tips for walking, while the little finger is slender and flexible, probably used for grasping branches. The teeth, ridged and leaf shaped, were built for grinding tough vegetation. The skeleton was scanned in three dimensions when it moved into the hall, so that scientists could study its posture and estimate its weight, which came out at around three quarters of a tonne.
The bones were found in 1914 by the fossil collector Reginald Hooley at Atherfield on the Isle of Wight. For most of the twentieth century they were called Iguanodon atherfieldensis, until a reassessment in 2007 gave the animal its own genus, named in honour of Gideon Mantell, the Sussex doctor who described the first Iguanodon teeth in the 1820s. It was chosen for Hintze Hall in 2017 as a reminder that the science of dinosaurs began in southern England.
Did You Know? This skeleton is the type specimen for the whole genus, meaning that every other Mantellisaurus in the world is compared against the bones in this bay.
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