The fossilised skull of a new species of mysterious meat-eating dinosaur from the Isle of Wight has been rediscovered in the collections of the Natural History Museum after over 100 years in storage.

Over its nearly 150-year history, this London museum has become home to over 30 million specimens, making it fairly easy to forget about the odd fossil or rock here and there. This is almost definitely what happened to the only known fossil of the UK’s newest dinosaur, a two-legged meat-eating theropod (the dinosaur family including birds) which we have named Invictibellatrix amberina in a new study.

In 2020, Paul Barrett, one of the museum’s palaeontologists, looked through the fossil collections and came across a small chunk of bone which he recognised as an important part of the skull of a dinosaur: the braincase. After going through museum records, he realised the braincase was found on a beach near Sudmoor Point of on the Isle of Wight, an island off the south coast of England known for its world-famous dinosaur fossils. Knowing that it came from the Isle of Wight, Barrett enlisted one of us (Cassius Morrison), a PhD student specialising in dinosaur braincases at the time, to study the fossil in detail and try to figure out which dinosaur it belonged to.

This work showed that the roughly 120 million year old fossil was unlike anything found from the island before and belonged to new species of a mysterious family of carnivores called the Megaraptora.

Megaraptorans are known for their slender skulls, lightly-built skeletons and gigantic hand claws, with some of the larger species having claws over 1 foot long. These ferocious predators are known from across the globe, with most species known from South America, particularly Argentina. Our new British species, Invictibellatrix amberina, was on the smaller side for megaraptorans, about 5 metres from head-to-tail and weighed as much a large tiger, making it the smallest known megaraptoran.

To study the new species, we compared it directly with the skulls of other carnivores. This involved playing a scientific version of spot-the-difference, looking at the subtle differences between species to work out what we were dealing with. We also used computed tomography (CT) scanning, which combines X-rays and computer processing to create detailed images, to look inside the braincase of Invictibellatrix and study what we could of its brain. Putting all of these findings into a computer algorithm to determine where our species sits in the family tree helped us to avoid bias in our interpretations.

Our work suggests that the new species was probably part of the early days of megaraptoran evolution, representing what these animals looked like before they grew to gigantic sizes, similar to their relatives the tyrannosaurs.

Invictibellatrix and its place in the theropod family tree are particularly important, as we now have a better understanding of when and how megaraptorans spread across the world. Before the discovery of Invictibellatrix, megaraptorans were only known from species of the early Cretaceous period (130-120 million years ago) of Thailand and Japan, plus multiple larger species from the late Cretaceous period (85–66 million years ago) of Australia and Argentina.

Warrior of the amber

The great distances between these discoveries means that megaraptorans must have been even more common than their fossils suggest, since there is no way for large animals like these to swim across the oceans that separated these continents during the Cretaceous period.

As the first European megaraptoran, Invictibellatrix provides us with strong evidence that the group probably travelled to the southern continents from Asia, via Europe and Africa. Afterwards they probably spread out across South America and Australia sometime during, or perhaps even before, the early Cretaceous period. The fossil also implies that other megaraptorans may be waiting to be discovered in Africa and even Antarctica.

Invictibellatrix probably lived alongside other carnivores such as Neovenator (a relative of Allosaurus), Ceratosuchops (a relative of Spinosaurus) and Eotyrannus, which as the name implies, was an early relative to the Tyrannosaurus rex. These four dinosaurs were probably eating different animals to each other to survive. The spinosaur specialised in eating fish, with the others eating more land-based prey. Invictibellatrix probably fed on small dinosaurs, mammals, lizards and even crocodiles.

The story of megaraptorans seems to follow the pattern of most of nature’s successes. A small opportunist living in the shadows of much larger animals around the globe only to become the dominant force in a few select ecosystems up to the end of the age of dinosaurs.

It’s this story which gave Invictibellatrix amberina its name, honouring the role of megaraptorans as the apex predators in the late Cretaceous of South America. It translates to “unconquered [female] warrior of the amber”.

Invictibellatrix does not tell us everything. Scientists are still not sure when megaraptorans first evolved, but the fossil does give us some much-needed clues. There is so much left to be discovered about dinosaurs. Sometimes their secrets can be found simply hiding away in museum collections waiting for someone to come and take a closer look.

Cassius Morrison received funding from the Richard Owen Research Grant of the Palaeontographical Society for the study of the new megaraptoran braincase. He is currently a Royal Society Career Development Fellow at the University of Leeds ( funded by the Royal Society).

Charlie Scherer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Freely available satellite radar imaging is being used for the first time to help track colonies of endangered emperor penguins in Antarctica throughout the winter months.

Typically satellite images need sunlight to be useful, and Antarctica is dark in the winter. This has meant that colonies have been hidden at a critical time in the emperor penguin breeding cycle, when eggs are laid, chicks hatch and adults take part in those iconic huddles.

Almost 70 colonies of emperor penguins, many of which have never been visited by humans, occupy the sea ice that is fastened to the coastline surrounding Antarctica.

Now using synthetic aperture radar (SAR), an instrument operating on satellites that sends microwave pulses down to Earth, and measures how those pulses return, our research team has been able to track what the penguins do during these months.

Unlike other forms of satellite imagery, SAR is not reliant on sunlight, or affected by cloud, and therefore provides radar imagery of Antarctica through the dark polar winter.

SAR’s signal is sensitive to the properties of what it interacts with, and has been used for years in the poles to research things like the properties of sea ice and melt on glaciers.

When looking at SAR images from the free European Space Agency satellite, Sentinel-1, showing the location of an emperor penguin colony during winter, my team started to notice a bright white splodge of pixels moving around against a backdrop of dark, smooth sea ice.

Features like icebergs or rough sea ice can look bright in SAR imagery, but it didn’t make sense for those to be moving around at that time of year, when the sea ice was fixed and stable. Could it be the emperor penguin colony?

We soon found the same thing at the locations of other colonies – clusters of bright moving pixels on stable ice. We were then able to obtain optical images from September when the sunlight first starts returning, and compare them with the SAR, and confirmed it was indeed the colonies we were observing.

Tracking through the whole year

This finding opened up an exciting opportunity to track colonies throughout the whole breeding cycle, by combining SAR images in winter with optical images in spring/summer, and all using freely available data that has been routinely collected for years.

We went back through eight years, from 2017 to 2024, and followed three of the largest colonies year-round. We were able to follow their movement, sometimes even daily from early in the winter until chicks grow their first feathers in December and January.

We observed that colonies were typically less mobile in the winter, before spreading out and moving greater distances in the spring and summer. Interestingly, we found that the Atka Bay colony moved up from the sea ice onto the glacier ice that flows from the continent in seven of the eight years in the early spring. The colony did this despite the sea ice – the typically preferred habitat for the species – being stable. We need more research to understand why this is.

Satellite remote sensing has been a crucial tool for observing the emperor penguins in the summer months since 2009. It was discovered then that colonies could be found in satellite images because of the dark guano stains they leave on the snow and ice. Overall, these observations have revolutionised our understanding of the species and have led to the discovery of many more colonies.

After a period of stability, Antarctic sea ice has declined markedly since 2016 and likely entered a new state, characterised by lower extent and increased instability. Earlier this year, emperor penguins were added to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list and classified as endangered, predominantly due to projected declines in sea ice.

This makes better understanding and monitoring of emperor penguins more important than ever. The ability to observe colonies throughout the breeding cycle using freely available, routinely collected satellite data creates opportunities to better understand their response to changing environmental conditions.

Grant Macdonald receives funding through a Natural Environmental Research Council project. He is a member of the Green Party of England and Wales.

For captive animals, engaging in natural behaviour is a pillar of the animal welfare framework. But when it comes to sex, one important behaviour has been largely ignored, and sometimes even punished: masturbation.

Solo sex is surprisingly common across the animal kingdom. It is well documented in primates. Tortoises are surprisingly vocal during their solo lovemaking endeavours, if not very graceful. Camels masturbate by rubbing their penises in the sand and porcupines make inventive use of all sorts of objects.

Our new study could change how other scientists view masturbation in birds and improve their welfare.

Masturbation also seems to be common in birds. A quick internet search brings up an abundance of video clips on social media and dedicated posts on bird-keeping forums, largely from worried or bemused hobbyist bird keepers.

It has often been treated as an abnormal problem behaviour in captive birds (particularly parrots). Folklore husbandry has assumed it is the undesirable outcome of stress, bad health or poor environment. Bird keepers often therefore discourage masturbation via punishment or veterinary interventions such as diet or care changes and, sometimes, even drugs and surgery. Despite the welfare implications, masturbation in birds had been largely unexplored by the scientific community.

We set out to change that, by investigating the distribution and evolutionary history of masturbation in birds for the first time. We studied 120 species of bird across 22 major groups, gathering data from the scattered scientific literature, online reports and community forums, and surveys of bird experts.

Our study found that masturbation is widespread across birds with a strong evolutionary history, meaning that it’s an ancient trait probably similar in closely related species. Although we found more records of masturbation in male birds, it occurs in both sexes and across all age groups.

Solo sex also seems to be linked to species that mate with multiple partners, supporting the idea that it might help to increase reproductive success when there is a high degree of competition over fertilisation. For instance, in males it may flush out old sperm to leave newer (better condition) sperm for mating. In females it may increase sexual arousal to help with sneak mating with males other than their partner.

Wild behaviour

Crucially, we discovered that masturbation is actually less common in captivity than the wild, and more common in birds reared by their own parents than by humans. What this tells us is that masturbation in birds is neither an unnatural behaviour, nor a consequence of captivity. Given this finding, it is important that birds are not prevented from masturbation. Of course, as with any behaviour, there may be extreme cases where chronic masturbation could indicate underlying health or husbandry issues.

Avian self-pleasure is usually a rather inelegant affair, in which a bird rubs their cloaca (a shared orifice for both excretion and reproduction) against an object, like a branch, twig or toy. This is often accompanied by a lot of flapping and self-satisfied vocalisation.

One potential reason for the lack of scientific studies exploring avian masturbation may be because the cloaca is thought to have fewer nerve clusters, and therefore lower sensitivity, than our own genitals.

Clearly however, birds are getting some satisfaction from masturbation, so perhaps there is more to a bird’s sensations during sex than has previously been recognised. Further exploration of this could have important implications for both welfare and captive breeding programmes. While sexual pleasure may not be exactly the same experience as for mammals, it is wildly premature to dismiss the idea that birds also feel pleasure.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.