Teacher's decades-old find on a Northern Ireland beach turns out to be the island's first-ever dinosaur discovery - CNN

Mystery swirled around what the fossils could be until a team of researchers with the University of Portsmouth and Queen's University Belfast confirmed they are fossilized dinosaur bones.

The 200-million-year-old fossils are the "first dinosaur remains reported from anywhere in Ireland," according to the article by the research team, published this month in the Proceedings of the Geologists' Association.

"This is a hugely significant discovery," Mike Simms, a paleontologist at National Museums NI who led the team of researchers, said in a news release Tuesday.

It noted that fossils in that area are usually sparse and heavily abraded.

"The two dinosaur fossils that Roger Byrne found were perhaps swept out to sea, alive or dead, sinking to the Jurassic seabed where they were buried and fossilized," said Simms.