China fossils confirmed as new dino species

British and Chinese researchers have confirmed that fossils found in China are from an entirely new species of dinosaur that belonged to the same family as the iconic extinct giants diplodocus and brontosaurus.

The fossils were first discovered in 2004 by a farmer in Lingwu, Ningxia Hui autonomous region. Since then, an excavation led by Xu Xing, a paleontologist from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has turned up whole or partial skeletons from between seven and 10 individual dinosaurs.

Xu and researchers from University College London and Imperial College London have published the first comprehensive study of the 174-million-year-old fossils in the journal Nature, confirming the dinosaur to be a new species and the earliest example of a diplodocoid dinosaur ever found.