An extremely well-preserved and baby dinosaur skeleton has been discovered in Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta.
This fossil is extremely rare and exciting as it’s the smallest intact skeleton ever found from a group of horned, plant-eating dinosaurs known as ceratopsids, a group that includes the iconic Triceratops.
It’s believed the creature, measuring 1.5 metres long, was about 3 years old. They determined it was a chasmosaurus belli, common in the area.
Because it had no bite marks or trace of injury, the researchers think it wandered into a stream, somehow drowned and was covered in sediment where it lay undisturbed for about 70 million years.
Philip Currie, a paleobiologist at the University of Alberta, first found what he thought was an exposed portion of turtle shell on a hillside, but upon digging a bit, he discovered it was the “frill” or bony decorative bone at the back of the head of ceratopsids.
Currie says the skeleton is almost complete and intact, so much so that even the skin with its tiny rosette pattern left an impression in the rock. However, sometime in the past a sinkhole opened underneath the fossil and the forelimbs were lost.
The find will help paleontologists determine how these plant-eaters grew and the complete skeleton will also help identify and place numbers of individual fossilized bones recovered over the years.
Currie says that from this find they have already been able to determine that head frills change in chasmosaur as they mature into adults over a 20 year period.
They also note however that body and leg proportions don’t change much from juvenile to adult, meaning that adults probably didn’t move fast and the young didn’t have to run to keep up.
By contrast, the juveniles of predatory dinosaurs like T-rex have disproportionately long legs in order to keep up with adults.
Adult chasmosaurs were a medium sized dinosaur weighing from 2-3 tons and measuring about 5 meters.
(with files from “LiveScience”)
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