Scientists discover oldest meat-eating dinosaur from UK

This artwork shows that Pendraig probably had sharp teeth and fed on other small reptiles

Scientists have discovered the oldest-known meat-eating dinosaur from the UK.

The theropod, which was in the same family as the Tyrannosaurus rex, was about the size of a chicken and had a metre long tail.

Scientists have named it Pendraig, which means "chief dragon" in Middle Welsh.

The fossils were discovered in a quarry in Pant-y-ffynnon, southern Wales, during the 1950s and are more than 200 million years old.

They were first talked about in 1983 by scientists but it's only now been realised that the fossils mark the discovery of a new species - the oldest theropod found in the UK.

"It was a typical theropod; so, a meat-eating dinosaur that walked around on two legs, like T. rex or Velociraptor that you'll know from the movies, but much earlier in time," explained the Natural History Museum's Dr Stephan Spiekman.

The four fossils were stored in the Natural History Museum but then somehow got lost in the huge number of collections, mistakenly stored with crocodilian remains.

Only recently were the bones recovered from the "wrong drawer" and recognised for their true significance.

The Pendraig would have been one of the earliest dinosaurs in existence, and would have been a fossil by the time the T. rex and Velociraptor were alive.

"What's so interesting and important here is that we're getting to see the very early stages of the evolution of the dinosaurs," Spiekman said.

"These animals eventually came to dominate the Earth, but in the late Triassic they were only one of several groups of reptiles that were living on land."