#vectipelta

Vectipelta head study

Hi there!

(Preserved bones and schematic skeletal of Vectipelta barretti [scale bar = 1 m], from Pond et al., 2023)

Meaning of name: Vectipelta = Isle of Wight shield [in Latin]; barretti = for Paul M. Barrett [British paleontologist]

Age: Early Cretaceous (Barremian)

Where found: Wessex Formation, Isle of Wight, U.K.

How much is known: Partial skeleton of one individual including much of the vertebral column, some limb bone fragments, and many armor plates. Some additional ankylosaur material from the same locality may belong to the same species (or even the same individual), but this cannot be confirmed at present.

Notes: Vectipelta was an ankylosaur, a group of armored herbivorous dinosaurs. Two other ankylosaurs have known from the Early Cretaceous of England since the 19th Century, the older Hylaeosaurus and the younger Polacanthus. However, Vectipelta appears to have been only distantly related to either of them, and may have instead been more closely related to the club-tailed ankylosaurine ankylosaurs. Traditionally, ankylosaur fossils from the Wessex Formation have often been classified as Polacanthus by default, but the discovery of Vectipelta indicates that this is not always a safe assumption to make.