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Scotland’s Dinosaur Isle – The Isle of Skye |
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Dinosaur fossils of any kind are rare in Scotland. Apart from a dubious record of a single track of a small saurischian dinosaur from Caithness, and Saltopus elginensis, a possible dinosaur from the Triassic rocks of Morayshire, only loose blocks on the foreshore around the coast of the Trotternish Peninsula, Isle of Skye have produced bones and footprints of dinosaurs.
The first dinosaur remains from Scotland – the Lealt Shale Formation footprint
Since the discovery of the first dinosaur track in1982 (now in the collections of the Hunterian Museum) in the Lonfearn Member of the Lealt Shale Formation (Bathonian, Middle Jurassic), it was not until about ten years later that the next discovery was made. A small fragment of an unidentifiable dinosaur bone was given to Mr Dugald Ross of the Staffin Museum, Isle of Skye, by a Mr Lachlan Scott-Moncrieff of Staffin. It was not identified as being part of a dinosaur bone until 2001 when it was first shown to Dr Neil Clark of the Hunterian Museum. This bone appears to have been found before other discoveries reported in the press in 1995 and before 1992.
The two bones reported in 1995 come from opposing ends of the Isle of Skye. A small bone in the collections of the National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh, was found in rocks of the Upper Broadford Beds (Sinemurian, Early Jurassic) from southern Strath and is likely to be the tibia of a ceratosaurian dinosaur similar to Coelophysis or Dilophosaurus. This bone is approximately 127mm long, whereas the other reported bone has a reconstructed length of about 900mm and is thought to be a limb bone of the sauropod Cetiosaurus. The sauropod bone is from rocks of the Valtos Sandstone Formation (Bathonian, Middle Jurassic) of the Trotternish Peninsula in the northern part of the Isle of Skye. The mid-shaft had been collected by an unknown collector, and the distal end had been collected separately by Mr Mitchell and Ms Wolfe of Staffin. The proximal end was found by Drs Boyd and Dixon of BP Exploration and reported to Mr Ross of the Staffin Museum. This bone can now be see in the collections of the Staffin Museum. Also in 1995, a small tail bone found in the vicinity of the sauropod bone was found. It turns out that this bone is probably from the tail of another small ceratosaurian dinosaur similar to Coelophysis. This bone can be seen in the collections of the Hunterian Museum.
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