If you were a dinosaur-obsessed child (or if you are secretly still a dino-fan as an adult), then you’re in for a treat. A long-necked dinosaur skeleton on display at the Boxtel Oertijdmuseum in the Netherlands has been recognised as a new dinosaur species called Ardetosaurus viator.
The bones of the 22-metre-long dinosaur nicknamed Kirby, were first found in 1993 by a Swiss team in the United States and taken to Switzerland where they were kept for 20 years. Parts of the skeleton had a temporary stay in Germany before all the bones were brought to the Dutch museum in Boxtel in 2018. At the time, the researchers thought the bones were from a Diplodocus.
As early as 2022, Tom van der Linden who was a university student working as an intern with the research team at the time, discovered bone characteristics that suggested that the dinosaur was actually a new species. “A boy’s dream,” said Van der Linden at the time. After much research, the discovery of a new dinosaur species was confirmed and published in a palaeontological scientific journal.
In October 2024, the official name of the dinosaur was announced at the prehistoric museum in Boxtel. Kirby’s scientific name of Ardetosaurus viator, which means "burning reptile traveller", was chosen to represent how much the dinosaur’s skeleton had been through with travels to several countries and even a fire at the storage hall in Germany where some bones were lost.
Kirby, who walked the Earth around 150 million years ago is now displayed at the Oertijdmuseum in Boxtel for everyone to marvel at - children and adults alike. The skeleton is 60 percent complete and has been supplemented with plastic parts.