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A British student has described how he discovered a previously unknown dinosaur species during a trip to the Natural History Museum.

Mike Taylor found a strange looking bone while carrying out research for his PhD in the museum's collections.

It turned out to be a dorsal vertebra, part of the backbone, from a dinosaur that walked the earth around 140 million years ago.

Mr Taylor, who is studying sauropod vertebrae as part of his PhD at the University of Portsmouth, said: "It leapt out at me as being different.

"I've spent the last five years doing nothing but looking at sauropod vertebrae so I immediately realised it was something strange. It was unmistakably a dorsal vertebra from a sauropod, but it didn't look like any dorsal I'd ever seen before."

The bone was dug up in Sussex in the early 1890s by fossil collector Philip James Rufford.

It was given a brief review by English palaeontologist Richard Lydekker and then left untouched in the Natural History Museum for the next 113 years.

The find is significant because it may represent a whole new family of dinosaurs. The new sauropod has been named Xenoposeidon which roughly means "alien sauropod".

Sauropods were herbivores and the largest were as big as a whale and weighed up to 70 tonnes - about as heavy as 12 elephants.

Mr Taylor and fellow palaeontologist Dr Darren Naish know the preserved bone came from near the hip area of the dinosaur.

From this they made an informed guess about the size and shape of the animal and were able to establish why Xenoposeidon is not only a new genus and species but probably a new family of dinosaur.

Mr Taylor said: "The big advantage we had over [Mr] Lydekker was 113 years of research, during which time a hundred sauropods had been named, many of them from excellent remains.

"There were lots of animals we could compare our specimen with and lots of useful papers describing and discussing them.

"It was quickly apparent that my first instinct had been right: this bone had belonged to a previously unknown species."

He added: "The difference between this specimen and other sauropod vertebrae is sufficiently great that I concluded that it could not be placed in any existing species or genus; in fact it can't be placed in any existing sauropod family."

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