A new species of dinosaur found at a brickworks in East Sussex is believed to be the world’s smallest.
The fossil of the bird-like dinosaur, which measures between 13 and 16 inches in length, was found in one of the pits at the Ashdown Brickworks near Bexhill, East Sussex.
The tiny dinosaur has been identified by Darren Naish and Steve Sweetman, palaeontologists at the University of Portsmouth, as coming from the Mesozoic era, which began approximately 250 million years ago.
The new specimen, which was carnivorous or omnivorous, has been identified from only a single neck vertebra measuring just 2.8 inches long.
This contains enough information to show that the dinosaur, nicknamed the Ashdown maniraptoran, was part of a group that included all of the two-legged, meat-eating dinosaurs called theropods.
Categories: Archeology, Malta