Angela Milner was born in 1947 in Gosforth, England, and studied at Newcastle University, where her doctoral research focused on early tetrapods -- among the first four-limbed vertebrates to move from water onto land. She joined London's Natural History Museum, eventually becoming Head of the Fossil Vertebrates Division and a senior scientist in the Department of Palaeontology.[1]
In spring 1983, an amateur collector named William Walker found an enormous claw in a Surrey clay pit and brought it to the museum. Milner led a three-week excavation that recovered roughly 60 percent of the animal's skeleton. She and colleague Alan Charig described it in 1986 as Baryonyx walkeri -- the first dinosaur ever found with direct evidence of a fish-eating diet, and a genus whose crocodile-like snout reshaped ideas about how varied theropod diets could be.[1]
Milner went on to serve as the scientific lead behind the Natural History Museum's Dinosaur Gallery, which opened in 1992 and remains one of the museum's signature exhibits. Over her career she published more than 80 papers spanning theropods, Archaeopteryx, plesiosaurs, and early tetrapods, retiring in 2009. She died in 2021 at age 73; a Tanzanian theropod, Veterupristisaurus, was named partly in her honor in 2011.[1][2]