Mifune Dinosaur Museum (御船町恐竜博物館) 御船町恐竜博物館

In 2025 a vertebra from Mifune became Nipponopterus, Japan's first pterosaur.

In August 1979 two people found, at Kami-Umenoki in the Mifune area, the tooth of a carnivorous dinosaur: announced in 1984 as the first carnivorous dinosaur fossil in Japan, it is known as ‘Mifune-ryū’. That discovery gave rise to the study of the Mifune Group (御船層群), an Upper Cretaceous stratum more than 2,000 metres thick which, among the strata of the same period in Japan, the museum considers the most varied in fossil dinosaurs. The museum opened in April 1998, was renovated in 2000 and opened its new building in April 2014. In March 2025 a scientific journal published the description of Nipponopterus mifunensis, a pterosaur with an estimated wingspan of between 2 and 3.5 metres, described from a neck vertebra found at Mifune: it is the first pterosaur in Japan to be named from a body fossil.

Kumamoto

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