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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.
Do you remember the last time you were laughing and simply could not stop? Perhaps it was a situation when you should not have been laughing at all.
This happened to one of us while accompanying a friend to a family court in the middle of an unpleasant divorce case. It led to a rapid dash to the bathroom while desperately trying (and failing) to regain control – not quite the kind of emotional support this friend was looking for!
Another classic example is the cricket commentators Brian Johnston and Jonathan Agnew who laughed so much as they described the day’s play in 1991 that they could not talk at all. But how and why does this happen?
In fact, although we typically associate laughter with amusement, most of it occurs for other, social reasons. For example, you are 30 times more likely to laugh if you are with someone else than if you are on your own. And you’ll laugh more if you know your companion and like them.
Most laughter occurs during conversations, when people may laugh through contagion – catching the laughter from someone else. Studies show that when we see or hear someone laughing, this can trigger laughter in us almost automatically, promoting social bonding.
We often laugh to demonstrate agreement and understanding, and to cement friendship – for example, over shared recollections. We also laugh to reduce stress.
These types of laughter, which we refer to as voluntary, are different from the helpless laughter that incapacitates us, and which we cannot prevent from happening. Helpless or involuntary laughs are longer and higher pitched, involving strange squeaks and whistles.
In our latest research, we have investigated whether these two different kinds of laughter might have their roots in entirely different brain systems.
Why we laugh. Video: TED.
Things get difficult
When attempting to understand the brain networks that underlie the production of laughter, things can get difficult quickly.
For a start, people move a lot when they laugh. This can cause problems for brain imaging techniques such as fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging). It can also be extremely difficult to get people to laugh naturally under laboratory conditions.
Another issue is that different regions of the brain all appear connected to laughter. One of us (Fausto) collaborates with the epilepsy surgery unit at Niguarda Hospital in Milan, where patients with drug-resistant epilepsy undergo electrical brain stimulation for clinical purposes. Electrical stimulation is highly precise and not affected by movement.
Normally, if you stimulate the motor system, the patient will move. If you stimulate the visual system, they may experience hallucinations. And if you stimulate the auditory system, they will hear sounds. But there are five or six areas of the brain where stimulation triggers loud laughter in the patient. So, why is this?
We recently reviewed all brain stimulation studies of people laughing, and how they felt when they laughed. These studies provide evidence that the areas of the brain where stimulation evokes laughter form two different laughter networks.
In one, encompassing the anterior cingulate cortex, the temporal pole and some subcortical regions, stimulation led to laughter accompanied by pleasant sensations and happy feelings – this is the more helpless, high-pitched laughter. When there was stimulation to the other network, which is in the brain’s motor and premotor regions, laughter led to speech impairments and was not associated with any emotional state.
Evolutionary differences
The areas constituting the first, more joyous laughter network mapped on to a network for vocalising that humans share with all other mammals. This is potentially also responsible for other spontaneous emotional vocalisations such as crying out.
Activation of this network during spontaneous laughter triggers a neurochemical cascade that taps into, among other things, the opioid system. This helps to explain the sense of pleasure and reward that comes from this joyous, uncontrollable laughter. The serotonin system that regulates our sensitivity to pain is also affected, which may explain why this laughter can temporarily dull physical pain.
From an evolutionary perspective, this network is older. It originates in the spontaneous emotional responses and rough-and-tumble play systems of animals, and is therefore largely unchanged between humans and other animals.
The other, voluntary laughs mapped on to a brain network linked to voluntary movements in humans, such as speaking aloud. These have a primary role in strategic communication and social negotiation, so may explain the particular use of laughter in conversation as a sort of spoken punctuation.
This neural system is found mainly in humans, and is associated with complex vocal acts such as speaking, singing and beatboxing.
A 2022 study looking at the shapes our vocal tracts make when we laugh in this conversational way found they resemble the shapes we make when we speak. In contrast, the shapes of our vocal tract when we laugh helplessly look very unlike speech, and their motor control is simpler, consistent with their ancient origins.
This research shows that voluntary laughter requires more complex and refined motor control than spontaneous laughter, occupying a middle ground between spontaneous laughter and spoken language – not only functionally but anatomically as well.
If a person has a stroke that damages this voluntary network, they can develop severe problems with speech while still being able to laugh, cry and swear. We would argue that this is because the older network remains intact.
The science of laughter may seem like a rather frivolous subject – and neuroscientists have certainly devoted more effort to studying negative emotions such as fear, anxiety, anger and disgust.
However, research on human laughter is turning out to be something of a Rosetta Stone for understanding a surprising range of phenomena – including the origins of the social brain in mammals, the mechanisms of bonding and empathy, pain modulation, language in conversation, and emotional contagion.
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.
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