Scientist finds dinosaur leg bone on Eigg beach run
A dinosaur bone has been found on the Isle of Eigg – the first time such a fossil has been discovered in Scotland outside of Skye.
The 166 million-year-old leg bone is thought to belong to a stegosaurian dinosaur, such as a stegosaurus.
Dr Elsa Panciroli, a research scientist at National Museums Scotland, stumbled across the fossil in what she said was a “serendipitous discovery”.
She added: “I was running along the shore on my way back to meet the rest of the team and I ran right over it.
“It wasn’t clear exactly what kind of animal it belonged to at the time but there was no doubt it was a dinosaur bone.”
Dr Panciroli said that, in 200 years of searching the area, “no one has found a dinosaur before, so this is quite special”.
She added: “This is a hugely significant find. Globally, Middle Jurassic fossils are rare and until now the only dino - saur fossils found in Scotland were on the Isle of Skye.
“This bone is 166 million years old and provides us with evidence that stegosaurs were living in Scotland at this time.”
The bone is just over half a metre long. It was found in a boulder on the foreshore. Although it was badly damaged by waves, there was enough remaining for a team of palaeontologists to study.
The bone was taken to a laboratory to be removed from the rock in which it was embedded. It was found to be part of the hind limb of a stegosaur.
A slow-moving plant-eater, the stegosaurus had a powerful spiked tail to defend itself against predators. It grew up to 9m long. Compared with the rest of its body, it had a small head and its brain was about the size of a plum.
The bone dates from the same period as similar fossils found on Skye. Eigg is already known for its Jurassic fossils, particularly marine reptiles and fish, first discovered by 19 th-century geologist Hugh Miller.
Dr Steve Brusatte, from the University of Edinburgh, cowrote a paper on the find.
He said: “Elsa’s discover y of this bone is really remarkable. Nobody, not even Hugh Miller himself, had found dinosaur bones on Eigg before.
“This fossil is additional evidence that plate-backed stegosaurs used to roam Scotland, which corroborates footprints from the Isle of Skye that we identified as being made by a stegosaur.”
The bone is now in the collections of National Museums Scotland in Edinburgh.
The fieldwork on Eigg was funded by the National Geo - graphic Society with the permission of the Isle of Eigg Heritage Trust.
Tracks of meat-eating dinosaurs had previously been found on Skye, shedding light on the reptiles’ behaviour. Researchers had unearthed a site of about 50 tracks in 2018.
A separate site found on Skye in 2015 had hundreds of footprints, almost all from enormous, long-necked, planteating dinosaurs known as sauropods. The paper on the Eigg find has been published in Earth and Environmental Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.