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Unusually colorful fossils found in Australia belong to an amazing new species of herbivorous dinosaur, scientists say today Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. The remains not only belong to the first group of herds or families of dinosaurs discovered in the country, they also represent the most complete dinosaur fossil ever discovered but preserved in the opal.
Discovered near the town of Lighting Ridge, about 450 km northwest of Sydney, the hundred bones have a rare blue-gray hue with flashes of brilliant color. Lightning Ridge is famous for making fossils carved in opal with often bright colors, a gemstone that forms for long periods of time from the concentration of underground solutions rich in silica. But finding a new species of dinosaur is remarkable.
Dinosaurs 101
More than a thousand species of dinosaurs once roamed the Earth. Find out what were the biggest and the smallest, what the dinosaurs ate and how they behaved, as well as some surprising facts about their extinction.
"Every time we find a new Australian dinosaur, it's interesting because we have so little," says Stephen Poropat, paleontologist at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, who was not part of the study team. . The count of known Australian dinosaurs is currently around 24, he notes, including Weewarrasaurus, another species of Lighting Ridge described last year.
The most recent species, Fostoria dhimbangunmal, was a Iguanodon– similar to a dinosaur that lived about a hundred million years ago during the Middle Cretaceous period, when this region was a vast floodplain with lakes and rivers flowing into the sea d & # 39; Eromanga, inland.
"The floodplains were often wet and very vegetated, making it a good place for herbivorous dinosaurs," says Phil Bell, head of the study, paleontologist at the University of New England at Armidale, in New South Wales.
The study of the dinosaurs of the time slice at Lightning Ridge is important, adds Poropat, as the world was then experiencing the hottest conditions of the past 150 million years.
"These dinosaurs lived in a truly incredible greenhouse land," he says. "The globe could have been very different, and these fossils can tell us how these dinosaurs were doing."
Bone package
Bob Foster, a longtime miner of the Lightning Ridge opal, discovered the fossil in 1986. Scientists at the Australian Museum in Sydney, as well as Australian Army Reservists, helped Foster to delve the discovery by accumulating dinosaur bones driven into blocks of rock. fossils in their collections.
But the fact that they remained languid without being studied for fifteen years and exposed in a Sydney opal store led Foster to decide to recover his discovery. He then traveled to Lightning Ridge, and his family eventually gave it to a local museum, the Australian Opal Center, where Bell was able to study the find.
As a unique fossil assemblage, scientists have left most of the bones embedded in the rocks and instead used a scanner to extract them numerically for research purposes.
"At first we thought it was a skeleton, but once we started to study the individual bones, we realized … there were parts of four shoulder blades, or shoulder blades, all of different sizes," he explains.
About 60 of the bones come from a probable adult 16 feet long, while the others come from juveniles of various sizes, which leads Bell to assume that it was about the remains of the bones. a family or a small herd of herbivorous dinosaurs.
"We have bones from all parts of the body, but not a complete skeleton," he says. "This includes the bones of the ribs, arms, skull, back, tail, hips and legs. It's one of Australia's most famous dinosaurs … [with] 15 to 20% of the skeleton of the species. "
The name Fostoria honors Bob Foster, while the name of the species dhimbangunmal means "sheepfold" in local indigenous languages, Yuwaalaraay and Yuwaalayaay. Foster's wife, Jenny, who is a native of Gamilaraay, chose to honor the community of Sheepyard, where Foster's mine was no longer operating.
Develop duckbills
About the length of an elephant, Fostoria would have the habit of walking on his hind limbs, although scientists assume that he sometimes used all four to move around. He probably ate primitive plants called horsetails, as well as bunya pines and hoops, which are also found in the region. (Learn about a sauropod dinosaur that probably crawled when it was baby and walked on both legs at adulthood.)
A parent of Iguanodon and the most famous dinosaur in Australia, Muttaburrasaurus, Fostoria It's also one of the first members of a group that would have evolved elsewhere to duck-billed hadrosaurs, which were widespread in North America and Asia in the late dinosaurs, there are about 66 million years.
"The first duckbill dinosaurs were the primordial soup from which the fantastic crested species … evolved afterwards," says Lindsay Zanno, a paleontologist at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science in Raleigh, who is not the only species in the world. did not participate in the research.
"Although the pace of discovery of the first duck beaks as Fostoria has intensified around the world, we still have a lot to learn about the success of these herbivores, "she added.
"Combining this story together is essential to understanding dinosaur ecosystems, especially across the southern continents, and Fostoria brings us closer to sorting. "
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