Hey, who are you calling pea-brain?
First dinosaur brain fossil found on British beach
ALTHOUGH they were the largest creatures ever to walk the earth, we’ve looked down on the dinosaurs for having tiny brains.
But a fossil hunter’s find on a Sussex beach may mean the extinct giants had more grey matter than we thought.
A pebble measuring four inches long has been confirmed as the first fossilised dinosaur brain.
It is thought to have come from the plant-eating Iguanodon, which grew to 30 feet long and weighed four to five tons.
Scientists believe the monster died in a swamp about 133 million years ago and its brain was ‘pickled’ in mud at the bottom. The brain tissue is so well preserved that blood vessels can be seen on the surface.
Fossil hunter Jamie Hiscocks picked up the specimen near Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, in 2004 but scientists have only now confirmed what it is.
Mr Hiscocks said: ‘I have always believed I had something special.’
Dr Alex Liu, from Cambridge University’s Department of Earth Sciences, which has been studying the fossil, said: ‘The chances of preserving brain tissue are incredibly small, so the discovery of this specimen is astonishing.’
Experts now think the Iguanodon could have been as clever as a crocodile and ranked among the ‘intelligent’ dinosaurs like the birdlike theropods depicted in the film Jurassic Park.
Typically in reptiles, the brain takes up about half the space in the skull because it is surrounded by a dense mass of blood vessels and vascular chambers.
But the tissue in the fossilised organ appears to have been pressed directly against the skull - raising the intriguing possibility that some dinosaurs had larger brains than previously thought.
If it was as tightly packed into the skull as it appears, this Iguanodon may have had a brain three times bigger than expected.
However the scientists cautioned against jumping to too many conclusions about dinosaur intelligence. They say the brain may have just collapsed against the skull as it decayed after death.
Dr David Norman, also of Cambridge University, said: ‘As we can’t see the lobes of the brain itself, we can’t say for sure how big this dinosaur’s brain was. Of course, it’s entirely possible that dinosaurs had bigger brains than we give them credit for, but we can’t tell from this specimen alone.’
He added: ‘What we think happened is that this dinosaur died in or near a body of water and its head ended up partially buried in the sediment at the bottom.
‘Since the water had little oxygen and was very acidic, the soft tissues were likely preserved before the rest of its body was buried in the sediment.
‘What’s truly remarkable is that conditions were just right in order to allow preservation of the tissue. Hopefully, this is the first of many such discoveries.’
The findings were revealed in a publication by the Geological Society of London in tribute to the late Professor Martin Brasier, from Oxford University, who co-led the research prior to his death in a road accident in 2014.
Mr Hiscocks was at the centre of controversy in 2006 after the Natural History Museum reportedly turned down his asking price of £750,000 for the fossil.