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(CNN) – You never know what you might find walking along the beach.
People often come across coins, shells and junk, but a teacher in Northern Ireland has made a discovery that will go down in history.
In the 1980s, the late Roger Byrne, a teacher and fossil collector, found several unidentified fossils on the east coast of County Antrim. He held them for several years before donating them to the Ulster Museum in Belfast.
The mystery swirled around what the fossils might have been until a team of researchers with the University of Portsmouth and Queen’s University of Belfast confirmed that they are fossilized dinosaur bones.
The 200-million-year-old fossils are the “earliest recorded dinosaur remains from anywhere in Ireland,” according to the research team’s article, published this month in the Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association.
“This is a hugely significant discovery,” Mike Simms, a National Museums NI paleontologist who led the team of researchers, said in a news release Tuesday. “The great rarity of such fossils here is because most of the Irish rocks are of the wrong age for the dinosaurs, too old or too young, making it nearly impossible to confirm the existence of dinosaurs on these shores.”
The researchers wrote in their paper that folklore attributes the apparent absence of dinosaur remains from Ireland to the activities of St Patrick, who is credited with chasing snakes from Ireland. But the lack of fossilized dinosaur bones is simply due to geology, they said. Rocks all over the country are of the wrong age or type.
“Finding an Irish dinosaur might seem like a hopeless task but, nevertheless, several potential candidates have been identified and are first described here,” the article says.
Researcher Robert Smyth and Professor David Martill of the University of Portsmouth analyzed the bone fragments with high-resolution 3D digital models of the fossils, produced by Dr. Patrick Collins of Queens University in Belfast.
The researchers initially believed that the bones came from the same animal, but then determined they came from two different dinosaurs.
“By analyzing the shape and internal structure of the bones, we realized they belonged to two very different animals,” Smyth said in the press release.
“One is very dense and robust, typical of an armored plant-eater. The other is slender, with thin bony walls and features found only in fast-moving two-legged predatory dinosaurs called theropods.”
Both fossils were pieces of the animal’s leg bones, according to the researchers. One was part of the femur of a four-legged plant eater called Scelidosaurus. The other was part of the tibia belonging to a two-legged carnivore similar to Sarcosaurus.
The beach where the fossils were found is covered in rounded fragments of basalt and white limestone, according to the magazine’s article. He noted that fossils in that area are usually rare and heavily abraded.
“The two dinosaur fossils Roger Byrne found were possibly wiped out at sea, dead or alive, sinking into the Jurassic floor where they were buried and fossilized,” Simms said.
This discovery helps shed light on the life of dinosaurs that roamed millions of years ago.
“Scelidosaurus continues to appear in the marine layers, and I’m starting to think it may have been a coastal animal, perhaps even eating algae like marine iguanas do today,” Martill said.
The Ulster Museum, which is closed due to coronavirus restrictions, plans to show the bones when those restrictions are lifted, the press release said.
This story was first published on CNN.com, “Master’s decade-long discovery on a Northern Irish beach turned out to be the island’s first dinosaur discovery.”
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