Some 125 million years ago, dinosaurs like Iguanodon and Polacanthus walked the floodplains of the Isle of Wight, a quaint island off the southwestern corner of England.
In fact, so many of these giants roamed there — or the conditions for preservation were so good — that the island now holds one of the richest deposits of dinosaur fossils in all of Europe, with parts of more than 20 species dating to the early Cretaceous period.
Some of these, like the Iguanodon, were among the first dinosaur species ever formally described by scientists — and fueled what’s been called a “Dinomania” in the 19th-century Victorian Age. But thanks to continued erosion on parts of the island, the discoveries continue even today.
“The spotlight will be more and more on the Isle of Wight for years to come,” says Jeremy Lockwood, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London and at the University of Portsmouth.
