To most visitors browsing the displays at London’s Natural History Museum, a bone is a bone.

But not to student Mike Taylor.

The sharp-eyed paleontologist discovered a previously unknown dinosaur after spotting a strange bone in the museum.

The bone from the Xenoposeidon, which is officially named today, had gone unnoticed for 113 years before Mr Taylor stumbled across it.

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And it is now thought the new dinosaur is not just a new species but probably from a whole new family.

The bone, a dorsal vertebra, sat untouched in the famous museum since it was unearthed in Sussex in the 1890s.

It was known to belong to a sauropod, a group of herbivores which roamed Earth 140million years ago.

But when Mr Taylor spotted it on a research trip, it struck him as odd.

The Portsmouth University PhD student said: ‘I’ve spent the past five years looking at sauropod vertebra so I immediately realised it was strange.’

After analysing the bone, he concluded it could not belong to any other known sauropod family.

The British Paleontological Association agreed with him and officially describes Xenoposeidon, or alien sauropod, in its latest journal.