Brighstoneus

Brighstoneus (after Brighstone, a village on the Isle of Wight) is a genus of hadrosauriform dinosaur from the Early Cretaceous Wessex Formation of the Isle of Wight, England. The genus contains a single species, Brighstoneus simmondsi, known from a partial skeleton. The holotype specimen, MIWG 6344, was discovered along with the holotype of Neovenator during the summer of 1978, when a storm made part of the Grange Chine collapse. Rocks containing fossils fell to the beach of Brighstone Bay on the southwestern coast of the Isle of Wight. The rocks were part of plant debris bed L9 within the variegated clays and marls of the Wessex Formation dating from the Barremian stage of the Early Cretaceous, about 125 million years ago. They were first collected by the Henwood family and shortly afterwards by geology student David Richards. Richards sent the remains to the Museum of Isle of Wight Geology and the British Museum of Natural History. In the latter institution paleontologist Alan Jack Charig determined that the bones belonged to two kinds of animal: Iguanodon and what would later become Neovenator. The "Iguanodon", later referred to Mantellisaurus, at first generated the most interest and in the early 1980s a team was sent by the BMNH to secure more of its bones. Amateur paleontologists Keith and Jenny Simmonds assisted in collecting remains. Brighstoneus was found to be distinct from Mantellisaurus by 2019 when being studied by the retired physician Jeremy Lockwood cataloguing all iguanodontian fossils from Wight for his PhD study at the University of Portsmouth. The new taxon was named and described as the type species Brighstoneus simmondsi by Jeremy A.F. Lockwood, David Michael Martill and Susannah Maidment in 2021. The generic name refers to Brighstone, mentioning it was the residence of the nineteenth-century palaeontologist William Fox. The specific name honours Keith Simmonds as discoverer. The holotype was discovered from strata of the Wessex Formation dating from the early Barremian, at least 125 million years old.