Discover.com reports the little dino was only about 12 inches long and lived during the Lower Cretaceous period, from 145 to 100 million years ago. The conclusions about the little maniraptoran dinosaur are based entirely on the finding of a single neck vertebra.
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| Ashdown maniraptoran |
In an abstract from Cretaceous Research (Volume 32, Issue 4, August 2011, Pages 464-471), Naish and Sweetman wrote that "The new specimen, a near-complete but water-worn posterior cervical vertebra, is tiny (total centrum length = 7.1 mm) but evidently from an adult theropod," and "By comparing the specimen to better known maniraptorans and estimating the proportions of the animal to which it belongs, we suggest that the total skeletal length of this maniraptoran was somewhere between 16 and 40 cm."
"I make no secret of the fact that many of the fossils I publish on are extremely fragmentary," Naish wrote in Terapod Zoology, " in many cases being single bones....but they can often be made with confidence if the material is good enough, and if it preserves the required informative bits of anatomy." Naish says that "such is the case with the new specimen," which consists only of "a single cervical vertebra." It was discovered, he says, by local collector Dave Brockhurst at Ashdown Brickworks near Bexhill, England.
Naish says that "the big deal about the Ashdown maniraptoran" is the fact that it's so small. That, he says, and the condition of the vertebra indicate strongly that the skeleton found belonged to an adult. In other words, the small size is not due to immaturity. This critter really was tiny. Naish says that the Ashdown maniraptoran is "one of the smallest Mesozoic dinosaurs reported so far."
