“As the servants of the Machines are becoming a privileged class, the Machines are going to be enormously more powerful”*…
Technological sovereignty is a nation’s ability to create, control, and own (or reliably source from reliable alllies) the technologies, infrastructure, and data essential to national security and economic growth.
Concerns with technological sovereignty date back to at least the 17th century (when, for instance, European mercantilist states banned the export of textile machinery to protect domestic monopolies and maintain a favorable balance of trade). They characterized much of the 20th century (as nations built up indigenous defense industries to ensure military independence).
In our 21st century, the one-two punch of the Trump tariffs and his attack on Iran (and the effective closure of the Straights of Hormuz), with the supply chain disruptions attendant on them, have raised the issue of technological sovereignty anew– and with a vengence. In our interconnected, interdependent– thus vulernable to disruption– world, China and the U.S. are in the lead; but experts project slow advance in national tech sovereignty over the next several years.
But this time around, Francesco Crespi and his co-authors argue, the Big Tech corporate monopolies/oligopolies in both China and the U.S. have emerged as even more important players (than their historical analogues have been). Their increasing dominance of private R&D, the increasing centrality of privately-controlled digital technology, their resultant control over knowledge, infrastructures, and key technologies such as telecoms, cloud computing, and AI. have made them central to nation’s futures, even as the Big Tech players (as corporations) have different imperatives.
Crespi, et al. unpack this state of play and propose a typology of technological sovereignty that takes into account the degree of technological dependence on Big Tech, the nature of the relationship between states and digital companies, and, consequently, a nation’s capacity to align the activities of these companies with its own strategic objectives. They summarize:
This paper has examined TS at a historical moment in which the control of critical technologies, infrastructures and knowledge is increasingly concentrated in a limited number of digital corporations. Its starting point was a conceptual tension in the existing debate. TS is commonly defined as the capacity of a state, or a federation of states, to access and provide critical technologies without incurring one-sided structural dependence (Edleret al., 2023). Yet this definition implicitly assumes that sovereignty is ultimately held and exercised by public authorities. The argument developed in the present paper is that this assumption has become increasingly problematic. In core domains such as cloud computing, AI, data infrastructures, satellite systems and digital services for defence, the effective control of technological capabilities is often exercised by private corporations whose interests, strategies and governance mechanisms only partly overlap with public objectives.
The empirical evidence discussed in the paper points to three connected transformations. First, the long-term retreat of public research and the expansion of intellectual property regimes have shifted the centre of gravity of innovation systems towards large private actors. The rise of ICT and platform-based business models has reinforced this tendency by allowing a small group of firms to accumulate data, proprietary knowledge, network advantages and infrastructural assets on a global scale. Second, the hierarchy of corporate R&D has changed substantially since the early 2000s. Digital firms, especially from the United States and China, now occupy the leading positions among global R&D spenders and dominate strategic technological areas such as AI, cloud and software ecosystems. Third, this concentration is infrastructural as much as technological. The control of data centres, cloud availability zones, platforms, operating systems and search engines gives Big Tech firms a systemic role in the functioning of economies, public administrations and security apparatuses (Coveri et al., 2025).
As a result, this concentration of techno-economic power modifies the relationship between the state and private capital. Public authorities no longer simply procure technologies from firms operating in competitive markets. In many cases, they depend on proprietary ecosystems that set standards, store data, provide computing capacity, update software and mediate access to essential digital functions. This produces a form of structural lock-in that is particularly severe in dual-use and security domains. The state can retain formal authority while losing part of the operational capacity required to exercise it. Under these conditions, TS cannot be evaluated only by measuring the presence of advanced technologies within a territory; it must also be assessed by asking who owns, controls and governs the infrastructures and knowledge through which those technologies are produced and deployed.
The analysis of the military-digital complex further strengthens this conclusion (Guarascio and Pianta, 2025). The digitalisation of warfare has made the capabilities of Big Tech increasingly indispensable for military and intelligence activities. Cloud infrastructures, AI systems, cyber-defence tools, satellite connectivity and battlefield data services have become essential components of contemporary security systems. At the same time, public procurement, defence contracts and battlefield experimentation reinforce the technological and market position of these firms. Hence, the resulting relationship is one of mutual dependence, but it is not necessarily symmetrical. Governments need access to digital infrastructures and capabilities that they often do not control internally, while Big Tech firms use military and security demand to consolidate their technological advantages, expand proprietary ecosystems and increase their bargaining power vis-a-vis public authorities. This gives concrete substance to the notion of privatised TS (Abels, 2026).
Building on this analytical and empirical framework, the paper proposes a typology for interpreting the notion of TS according to these structural transformations. In particular, it distinguishes between strong and weak technological sovereignty and between private-driven, public-driven and public-private-driven governance arrangements. This distinction matters because the same technological capability may have different economic and political implications depending on the distribution of control across states, domestic firms, foreign firms and hybrid institutional arrangements.
They conclude:
Taken together, these findings suggest that TS should not be assessed only by asking whether a country possesses advanced technologies. It should also be assessed by examining how control is distributed and governed across the state, domestic firms, foreign firms and hybrid governance arrangements. The broader implication is that private-driven TS is not neutral from a welfare standpoint. It may increase innovation speed and geopolitical capacity, but it can also redirect technological change towards rent extraction, militarisation and proprietary lock-in. On the opposite, public-driven technological sovereignty can better preserve public-good objectives, but public institutions should possess adequate technical, financial and organisational capabilities, while public-private technological sovereignty can work when public conditionality is strong; otherwise, it may degenerate into the socialisation of risk and the privatisation of control. A welfare-oriented strategy for TS should therefore prioritise public and collective control over essential technological infrastructures, strengthen public R&D and procurement capabilities, impose interoperability and open- standard requirements, and ensure that critical data, patents and infrastructures generated with public support remain accessible for public purposes.
The central policy question, therefore, is not simply how to become technologically sovereign, but how to prevent the pursuit of sovereignty from becoming a vehicle for the privatisation of the very capabilities on which welfare, democracy and long-term development depend. Technological sovereignty can strengthen resilience, strategic autonomy and collective welfare only if it is embedded in institutions capable of governing technological change in the public interest. Without such institutions, the language of sovereignty may legitimise new forms of dependency: dependence on domestic monopolies in some countries, dependence on foreign platforms in others, or dependence on public-private arrangements in which public authorities finance
strategic projects while private actors retain control over their future trajectories. A research and policy agenda on TS should therefore place ownership, governance and accountability at the centre of the analysis, alongside capabilities and geopolitical positioning.
Eminently worth reading in full: “Technological Sovereignty, Big Tech, and the Military-Digital Complex” via @ssrn.bsky.social. (Full PDF here.)
See also: “Technology sovereignty as an emerging frame for innovation policy. Defining rationales, ends and means” and “Reconciling open science with technological sovereignty“
And for a look at one of the moving parts of the puzzle, one that underlines the importance of Crespi’s closing suggestions: “Elon Musk and SpaceX’s Futurist Coup.”
(Image above: source)
* J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
###
As we develop deftly, we might might send connected birthday greetings to a man who was instrumental in the development the promise/threat of Big Tech as today we know it: Mark Weiser; he was born on this date in 1952. A comouter scientist and CTO of Xerox PARC, he is is widely considered to be the father of ubiquitous computing, a term he coined in 1988, when he described a future in which personal computers would be replaced with tiny computers embedded in everyday “smart” devices and their connection via a network.
“Always create more value than you capture”*…
There are, of course, myriad ways to rank people. Increasingly these days, the preferred scale seems to be one’s wealth. The Forbes 400, which ranks the richest Americans by their wealth, has become the scorecard of our zeitgeist. But one of its denizens (currently #4), Jeff Bezos, suggested in 2024, “somebody needs to make a list where they rank people by how much wealth they’ve created for other people.”
Sakshyam Patro has obliged…
… this is that list: [It ranks] founders by Wealth Created For Others (WCFO): the dollar value their companies generated for shareholders other than themselves…. every number traceable to an SEC filing, an academic dataset, or a named data source — refreshed every fifteen minutes while markets are open. Each figure is the shareholder wealth a founder’s company created, now held by index funds, pensions, employees and co-founders, minus what the founder kept. It’s not a claim that one person built the company alone…
See the list here. (Teaser: as of this writing, Bezos moves up one slot, from #4 to #3); the current Forbes #1, Elon Musk, drops to #28 (his wealth is $798B; his investors have lost $243B). And see the details of the methodology here.
Patro adds some important context– the first point especially:
- It is the Forbes billionaires list, re-sorted — not a ranking of humanity’s benefactors. The universe is living billionaires with a trackable public company. Norman Borlaug, Linus Torvalds, vaccine developers, and public-sector reformers created enormous value and belong at the top of a different list; they are absent here because they are not billionaires with public equity, not because the metric judges them small. This list answers exactly one question Bezos posed: among the people Forbes already ranks by personal wealth, who created the most for others versus kept for themselves?
- Not a measure of consumer surplus, wages, or societal value beyond shareholders (those are larger still — Nordhaus [see here] estimates innovators capture only ~2.2% of the social surplus they create — but they are not reliably measurable per person, so we do not headline them).
- Not a moral scoreboard. It measures one thing: dollars of shareholder wealth created beyond a risk-free benchmark, minus dollars kept.
- Not affiliated with Forbes or with any prior ranking site.
Ranked by the wealth they built for other investors: “The Anti‑Forbes List.”
To observe the obvious, the numbers at play here are big… so big as to be hard to understand. Amanda Shendruk urges us to make the effort and offers some helpful tips: “Understanding large values: It’s our ethical duty.”
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As we re-evaluate, we might recall that it was on this date in 1598 that Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice was entered on the Stationers’ Register. By decree of Queen Elizabeth, the Stationers’ Register licensed printed works, giving the Crown tight control over all published material. In those days, “copyright” mainly meant “the right to make copies”; secondarily, it conferred intellectual property rights (though in those days, mainly to the guild printers who got the permissions).
In some cases, the companies of actors appear to have registered plays through co-operative stationers, with the express purpose of forestalling the publication of a play when publication was not in their interest. This seems to have been the case with The Merchant of Venice and Shakespeare’s company, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men: the copyright was granted to James Roberts, who printed the company’s playbills and held copyrights on five of their plays (two by Shakespeare). But Roberts transferred the copyright to fellow stationer Thomas Heyes in 1600, and Hayes published first quarto edition of the play before the end of the year.
“It’s about nothing”*…
Seinfeld, which originally aired on NBC from July 5, 1989, to May 14, 1998 (for a total of 180 episodes over nine seasons) ruled the airwaves during the 90s. Its reign continued, first in syndication, then streaming, and hold sway to this day. The series won all of the major awards for which it was eligible (a few, several times over) and is universally regarded as one of the greatest and most influential American shows of all time. Quotes from several of its episodes have become catchphrases in popular culture.
Most of us know Seinfeld, but not all of us… and even those if us who do, have more to learn. Andy Kirk is here to help…
I was intrigued by the possibilities of mixing work with pleasure: visually exploring a sitcom through its data.
Intrigued became compelled. I wanted to explore how Seinfeld and David, with the support of their evolving pool of talented writers, managed to achieve such sustained sitcom brilliance. Much like a sports coach seeks to assemble the right players in the right combinations, to win a game, how did the Seinfeld ‘coaching team’ use their resources to assemble the right characters in the right scenes, in order to score the laughs and create TV gold?
And so began a self-motivated, long-running, entirely unnecessary, data-driven exploration of every episode of Seinfeld.
The first product of this work was my 2020 publishing of The Seinfeld Chronicles, a limited-edition printed book presenting all my extensive analysis. With 176 copies released, matching the number of written episodes, this reached a small but exclusive, passionate, and generous audience.
A few years later, I decided it was time to revisit this work and develop a new format that could reach a wider audience…
A trove of insight into a epoch-defining sit-com and a glorious example of data visualization: “The Seinfeld Chronicles: Digital Edition,” from @visualisingdata.com.
* George explaining the premise of the show he and Jerry are trying to pitch to NBC
###
As we codify comedy, we might recall (on this, National Junk Food Day) that it was on this date in 1988 that The New York Yankees traded Jay Buhner (along with minor leaguers Rich Balabon and Troy Evers) to the Seattle Mariners in exchange for 33-year-old first basemen and designated hitter Ken Phelps– widely considered one of the most lopsided deals in MLB history. While Phelps had a brief, productive stint in New York before being traded again, Buhner became a fan favorite and a legend in Seattle. Over his 14 seasons with the Mariners, he hit 310 home runs and was a key piece of the team that reached the ALCS in 1995, 1997, and 2000. He was inducted into the Seattle Mariners Hall of Fame in 2004.
In Seinfeld‘s seventh season episode “The Caddy,” Yankee’s owner George Steinbrenner (voiced by Larry David) visits George’s parents to (mistakenly) inform them that their son is dead. While George’s mother tears up, George’s father Frank (Jerry Stiller) responds…
“I believe that we can forecast the ‘changing landscape of context,’ and thus get insight into when we are entering the danger zone”*…
Derek Thompson shares his interview with philosopher Agnes Callard…
Here are some questions that I consider self-evidently compelling about the modern world:
- Why is the news media so interested in telling you how much the world sucks all the time?
- Why are so many of us obsessed with distraction and managing our attention?
- Why is it so hard to stop comparing ourselves to others?
- And why does everything in art and design seem the same these days?
A week ago, I didn’t think these questions were related. I’m not sure I would have told you I had a good answer to most of them. And I certainly wouldn’t have made the audacious and borderline bonkers claim that one single theory could begin to explain all of them, at once.
But then I had the pleasure of speaking to Agnes Callard, the University of Chicago professor, about her new theory called “the uni-context.” It’s easily one of them most interesting conversations I’ve had all year. And once you’ve heard or read it, I think you might find it hard to think about anything else.
One way to prepare your mind for Callard’s theory of the uni-context is to think about the better-known concept of “context collapse.” If you post something to social media, it will be simultaneously visible to your boss, your parents, your ex, and total strangers. So, while your offline life might be distinct with each of these groups—you might be differential to your boss, childish with your parents, and bawdy with your friends—all of those distinctions are flattened on the internet. That’s context collapse, and you can think of it as the answer to a question: How do informational norms change when we’re all living in the same universal room?
Callard takes the idea significantly further. She asks: How do all other norms—our morals, our ethics, our sense of what is good for us and for others—change when we continually imagine ourselves to be living in a universal room with everybody else? The connections that Callard makes are consistently surprising, often quite funny, and ultimately mind-exploding…
A small sample…
… Thompson: Tell me if this is a fair recapitulation of our conversation so far.
For most of human history, people judged norms based on local context. A home had its own rules, a cathedral its own rules, and a classroom or bar or funeral parlor had its own rules. But now it is almost like we are constantly living in universal rooms, and the universal room we occupy is assumed to have universal values and universal norms. That has specific implications. First, rather than talk about what is good, which is context-dependent, we tend to focus about universal truths, and it’s easier to talk about universal bads than goods, so people focus on negativity. Two, character is context-dependent, so we talk less about character and more about its universalist equivalent, which is identity.
There’s a third implication that we should discuss. If everyone is on the same comparable plane, the same evaluative field, then comparison itself becomes a more inextricable part of life.
Callard: Exactly.
Thompson: Tell me how the uni-context leads to a world of more comparison and competition.
Callard: Imagine two school districts with two high schools that do things slightly differently. If you’re in district A, you go to school A, and if you’re in district B, you go to school B. There might be a lot of information about what they do, but people treat it as: I’m in this district, so I go to this school. Then they change the rule: You can go to either school no matter where you live. Suddenly there is motivation to compare. You had the information before, but no motivation to compare, because the schools were not in the same space of choice, the same evaluative field.
Now they are, so you find ways to compare them: graduation rates, what colleges people get into, how many AP classes they teach. And that affects the schools. Suppose one gets less popular because it doesn’t teach many AP classes. They were offering an individualized curriculum, but now everyone’s going to the other school, so they say, “We’ve got to teach AP classes too.” The process homogenizes the two schools, so they can compete. That’s not the only possible result. They could specialize, with one becoming the school for freshman and sophomore years, the other becoming the school for junior and senior years. But if they don’t recreate a normative barrier, you get homogenization from comparison.
As more things enter the same evaluative field, you make comparisons you never used to be able to make.
Thompson: There are three pieces I’m trying to keep straight.
One, the upstream phenomenon of the uni-context. Two, the downstream phenomenon of more fields of comparison. Three, the further downstream phenomenon of homogenization.
This is where the theory really starts to sing for me, because I think about sports. As the analytics revolution came for baseball, you had all these teams in possession of the same statistics by which they could compare players. Previously, you had 30 teams using their own private scouts, so their analysis was more context-dependent. But when an easily calculable statistic like on-base percentage or WAR becomes the conventional way to evaluate whether a player is good, all the players become part of the same comparative set. You can rank them one-to-250 easily on a spreadsheet.
But analytics didn’t just lead to more math, or more comparison. It led to more homogenization of strategy. One of the great critiques of baseball has been that every team essentially does the exact same thing: it’s the same strategies for pitchers; the same strategies for hitters; the three true outcomes; all the batters swinging for the fences. So you have the uni-context creating a comparative field, in this case analytics, which leads to homogenization.
Callard: What you said reminded me that I have a theory of the inflection point for the uni-context. I don’t think it started five or ten years ago. The moment it really showed up was around 1910.
One century ago, there were a bunch of people looking around at the world, thinking: What the hell is happening? Did culture break? A lot of those people were novelists, and they wrote a new kind of novel called the modernist novel, which is a novel about how to live in a world in which the uni-context is just coming into existence. Theorists of the time—such as Georg Simmel, Max Weber, and Martin Heidegger—they noticed something weird was going on. They tended to describe it in terms that sound almost like the opposite of the uni-context. They described it as the fragmentation of everything. All of a sudden, they said, everything is breaking apart. That was my first clue.
The reason I thought of this is that you said everything is becoming homogenous, and I thought, “in a way, yes, but that’s a later effect.” The first thing that happens when a bunch of stuff is unified in a single evaluative field is that you feel overwhelmed by your choices. It feels like stuff is fragmented, because you don’t know how to compare these things, because you haven’t yet developed technologies of comparing them.
So, the early feeling of the uni-context was a feeling of the world being fragmented. If you were a medieval peasant doing art, you were in art’s normative world. If you were in the church, you were in the church’s normative world. But in the 20th century, around World War I, you start to think: How do we reconcile the schoolteacher turned murderer, the soldier? How do we think about the relationship between art and religion? We’re suddenly trying to compare all these different values inside a single context, and the world feels dis-unified. Eventually we get technologies of commensurability. What fragmentation really means—and that part was invisible to these writers—is that suddenly everything is part of the same evaluative field. That’s why you experience a multiplicity where you used to experience one thing at a time…
There’s much more, all of it provocative. Here, the conclusion…
Thompson: I want to know what we should do about this.
A simple answer might be: When you’re having dinner with your family, you can be present with your family, or you can be on your phone, which is a universal room that makes you everywhere at once. So put away the phone. But that feels like a cheap and predictable answer. Do you have something prescriptive that isn’t just “put away the phone at family dinner?”
Callard: The question of whether the uni-context is good or bad is loaded, because the uni-context struggles to see good things. It’s better at seeing bad things. Pretty much everyone who hears me talk about the uni-context immediately responds that it’s bad. I’ve never had anyone say, “The uni-context sounds great!”But the thing is that this supposedly bad thing is a thing we’re creating. We’re choosing it over and over again. Even me talking to you from far away about an abstract thing [is the uni-context.]
The uni-context is a space of unruliness. It’s a space in which a certain thing about humanity gets expressed, namely our deep aversion to “world closure.” For almost all of human history, we have lived in closed little worlds, and those worlds presented themselves as the only world. A series of contexts presented the person with direction—here’s what you should do. What we are moving toward is a “world openness” that we hunger after, where I’m not just going to do things a certain way because that’s how we do things or where I was born.
Antonio Gramsci famously said, “the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” So, how do we use openness, as Callard describes it, as space in which to create a world in which we want to live? How do we recover the wisdom imbedded in context– the accreted shell of our shared history– without context’s reactionary trappings? How do we build anew a better world?
In any case, once you learn what the “uni-context” is, you won’t stop seeing it everywhere: “A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird,” from @dkthomp.bsky.social and @agcallard.bsky.social.
###
As we muse on milieu, we might recall that it was on this date in 1963 that The Essex (a singing group composed of four active-duty Marines) reached #1 on Billboard R&B chart with their first release “Easier Said Than Done” (which had been intended as the B-Side of the record); it went on to top Billboard‘s Hot 100, and was the biggest hit of their career.
“O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure!… Ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who comes alive in them.”*…
Readers may have seen news of the sale of “Gus,” a T. Rex skeleton that fetched a record $50,130,000 at Sotheby’s in New York last Tuesday. It’s part of a trend.
Devon Pendleton reports that dinosaurs have become an asset class for billionaires, with alarming implications for science… and, unsurprisingly, the market is about as orderly and genteel as a starving T. Rex. She uses a different recent sale, one that went pear-shaped, as an example…
It was supposed to be an unprecedented sale for the world’s wealthiest collectors. Shen, a Tyrannosaurus rex, was set to be the first of its kind ever sold at auction in Asia. The reconstructed creature, whose name means “godlike” in Chinese, was tens of millions of years old and longer than a city bus, frozen midstep with its massive skull cocked, jaws agape, as if ready to snatch up an onlooker. Christie’s was auctioning off Shen in November 2022, alongside works by Picasso, and it was expected to sell for $15 million to $25 million.
Dinosaur skeletons had recently become a hot new asset class, coveted by the ultrarich, not unlike sports franchises or Fabergé eggs. They offered a mix of glamour and primal appeal to a certain type of high-net-worth buyer—someone who might find the conventional art market fussy or convoluted but couldn’t deny the allure of a T. rex. “It could gobble you up in one bite. It’s just an amazing creature,” says billionaire Dan O’Dowd, who bought his T. rex, Samson, for a bargain $600,000 in 2009. “It’s the best trophy kind of thing you could own.”
Two years before the Shen auction, Christie’s had sold a T. rex named Stan, said to be one of the most complete and best-preserved specimens ever found, for $31.8 million, trouncing the top-end presale estimate of $8 million. And two years after the Shen auction, financier Ken Griffin spent $44.6 million on a stegosaurus (“a vegetarian,” O’Dowd notes). Leonardo DiCaprio, Nicolas Cage and other celebrities have gotten in on the dino game too.
A dinosaur’s value, like a painting’s or sculpture’s, derives from a protean mix of provenance, desire and authenticity—the last one hard to define, let alone prove, and in the case of an auction, up to the buyer to verify. Christie’s marketing blitz for Shen included the claim that it was one of the most “scientifically studied T. rex skeletons to come to auction,” featuring it in a short promotional video in which the camera cinematically races in for tight shots of its menacing talons and gaping jaw as eerie electronic music pulses in the background. Christie’s made clear that the winning bidder would also get renaming rights, a tradition in which T. rexes in circulation are often given human names.
A month before Shen was supposed to arrive at Christie’s in Hong Kong, it was put on display at Singapore’s Victoria Theatre and Victoria Concert Hall, a stately neoclassical building with a grand clock tower. Families, tourists and prospective buyers in chauffeured Bentleys came to see the T. rex in the flesh, so to speak. But Shen never made it to the auction block…
[Pendleton unpacks the full–and fascinating– tale of Shen. She concludes…]
… In recent years the dinosaur market has gotten only more exuberant. Last year at Sotheby’s a juvenile Ceratosaurus—smaller than a T. rex, but just as carnivorous—sold for $30.5 million, five times its high estimate. Some collectors, including Abu Dhabi’s new natural history museum and German biotech investor Christian Angermayer, are funding teams of bone hunters to scour the fossil-rich western US. Todd Graves, the billionaire behind Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers, emerged as a collector when he lent his triceratops skull to the Louisiana Art & Science Museum.
And on July 14 in New York, Sotheby’s held what was hyped to be the hottest T. rex auction yet. Gus, as the creature is named, was described as 61% complete by bone count and 75% to 80% by bone mass with “an exceptionally preserved skull.” As the bids climbed, the auctioneer tempted potential buyers. “Try a bigger bite,” she said. “It’s a T. Rex after all.” Gus sold for $50.1 million, the highest ever paid for a dinosaur at auction.
Billionaires and their toys: “The Bone Rush,” gift article from @bloomberg.com.
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As we ponder possession, we might recall that it was on this date in 1983 that a new species of flesh‑eating dinosaur nicknamed “Claws,” later formally named Baryonyx walkeri was announced…
A huge new dinosaur skeleton has been unveiled to the media at the Natural History Museum in London.
Plumber and amateur fossil hunter Bill Walker, 55, found a foot-long claw belonging to the flesh-eating beast at a clay pit in Surrey in January.
When he found the rock containing the talon he tapped it and the whole thing cracked.
Palaeontologists reconstructed it and dated the remains at 125 million years old, describing them as the find of the century…
… Nicknamed Claws, the dinosaur would have been slightly smaller than the Tyrannosaurus Rex – with teeth like steak knives – and was probably a sub-species of the Megalosaurus.
– source
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