PORTSMOUTH A dinosaur fossil kept in the Natural History Museum for more than a century has been identified as a completely new species by a British doctoral student.

Mike Taylor, who is studying for a PhD at the University of Portsmouth, spotted the bone while conducting research at the museum. He said: “I’ve spent the past five years doing nothing but looking at sauropod vertebrae. It leapt out at me – it was unmistakably a dorsal vertebra from a sauropod, but it didn’t look like any dorsal I’d ever seen before.”

He has since confirmed that it belongs to a previously unknown kind of sauropod, the long-necked group of herbivores that includes Brontosaurus and Diplodocus.

The new creature has been named Xenoposeidon proneneukus, meaning “forward-sloping alien earthquake god”. It was comparatively small for a sauropod, at between 15m and 20m (50ft to 65ft) long and between 2.8 and 7.6 tonnes, and lived about 140 million years ago.

The bone was unearthed in the 1890s near Hastings in East Sussex, but was never fully classified and has not been studied in 113 years. Details of the new species are given in the journal Palaeontology.

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