A new dinosaur has been discovered in slabs of sandstone in the eastern Utah area of Dinosaur National Monument. The new species is a type of sauropod – long-necked herbivores that include the largest animals ever to walk the Earth. Scientists have known the remains were there since 2005, but extremely hard rock around the bones kept them from excavating.
Finally, last year, a team from Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado spend three days detonating handset explosives to loosen the rock without damaging the bones. Scientists have been carefully pulling fossils from the quarry ever since.
The site also includes two complete skulls from other types of sauropods, an extremely rare find on in itself. ”You can hardly overstate the significance of these fossils,” says Dan Chure, a paleontologist at the monument. Of the 120 or so known species of sauropods, complete skulls have been found for just eight because of the fragile nature of their skull bones. The new species is called Abydosaurus mcintoshi. It’s part of the larger brachiosaurus family. Paleontologists believe they have remains of at least four dinosaurs at the site, juveniles that were likely to have been around 25 feet long.
The new fossils promise to give us new insight into the lives of dinosaurs, including the evolution of sauropod teeth which will also reveal a great deal about their eating habits. Early sauropods had wide teeth, later ones had narrow, pencil-like teeth. The abydosaurus teeth are in-between, which will help scientists fill out the trajectories of their evolution and see how their eating techniques and diet evolved.
Art by Michael Skrepnick c/o USA Today
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