Vectipelta (meaning "Isle of Wight shield") is an extinct genus of ankylosaurian dinosaur recovered from the Early Cretaceous Wessex Formation of England. The genus contains a single species, V. barretti, known from a partial skeleton including several osteoderms. It was historically known as the "Spearpoint ankylosaur" prior to its description.
Vectipelta (meaning "Isle of Wight shield") is an extinct genus of ankylosaurian dinosaur recovered from the Early Cretaceous Wessex Formation of England. The genus contains a single species, V. barretti, known from a partial skeleton including several osteoderms. It was historically known as the "Spearpoint ankylosaur" prior to its description.
== Discovery and naming == left|thumb|Life restoration The Vectipelta holotype specimens, IWCMS 1996.153 and IWCMS 2021.75, were discovered in November 1993 (nine vertebrae by Gavin Leng) and March 1994 (by Lin Spearpoint) in sediments of the Wessex Formation near Chilton Chine on the Isle of Wight, England. The holotype consists of a partial skeleton including many cervical, dorsal, sacral, and caudal vertebrae, partial pectoral and pelvic girdles, elements of the fore- and hindlimbs, and several osteoderms. At first the remains were assigned to Polacanthus.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).