It’s been way too long – weeks maybe – since a dinosuar was in the news. High time. Maybe some day some paleontologists will find a new dinosaur with some sort of way to distinguish it from other dinos, and it won’t make the news. That will be the end of the world as we know it. These beasts are evergreen.
This time it is a two-fer from one journal.
First up, a fringed, horned dinosaur of the general sort as famed triceratops whose bones have been in human custody for nearly 100 years. That makes for good story telling. They were dug from the ground in southern Alberta, a time of frenzied dinosaur foraging. They and the stones encasing them were so scrappy compared to the big intact skulls, femurs, and vertebra of other ones from the busy bone quarries of North America that the London Natural History Museum’s triage system pronounced them a near-junk fit for nought but immediate, deep storage.
Somebody finally got around to taking a second look. So, meet Spinops sternbergergorum, or Sternberg’s spine face, named for the naturalist Charles Sternberg who, with his son Levi, dug them up in the first place and, suspecting a new type of horned dinosaur left them behind, shipped the fossiliferous rock off to London. It is, it says here, a whole new species and even better, a new genus.
The news arises from a paper in the open access journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica (see Grist below). It received a push from a press release from the Natural History Museum and, perhaps, a few from other institutions.
Stories:
- Cleveland Plain Dealer – John Mangels: Cleveland researcher, international team, identify new type of horned dinosaur ; Mangels has some inside dope on the resurrection of this sleeping treasure in the museum’s catacomb, spun out in a narrative of persistence and savvy.
- PostMedia News – Randy Boswell : Long-ignored fossil determined to be new species of horned dinosaur ;
- Telegraph (UK) Nick Collins: New dinosaur species discovered in Natural History Museum after nearly a century ;
- CBC (audio) Introducing the Spinops sternbergorum ;
Second, a humongous pair of neck vertebra, implying a the largest sauropod in North America, reported in the same journal. It’s taken the better part of a decade, but a team of researchers analyzing the neck bones and a femur uncovered in New Mexico, says they belonged to a whopper. It is believed to be an alamosaurus, close cousin of the Argentinosaurus, which presently gives South America the crown as home of world’s largest dinosaur. This new member of the titanosaur clan is about as large, belongs to the same general group, and reveals to paleontologists that some smaller samples already known, and thus seen as evidence that the northern wing of the family just ran small, may have been partly-grown juveniles. Our big ones matched their big ones.
Stories:
- MSNBC Cosmic Log – Alan Boyle: Meet America’s biggest dinosaur ;
- Register – Anna Leach: North America makes entry into dino fatty league ;
- NBC Montana – Lauren Maschmedt: MSU Researcher Uncovers Bone From North America’s Largest Dinosaur;
Grist for the Mill:
Museum of Natural History Press Release, Raymond M. Alf Museum Press Release ; journal paper on S. sternbergorum ;
Montana State U Press Release ; paper on humongous titanosaur.
Acta Palaeontological Polonica 56 (4) 2011 Article list ; (rather interesting, with another one on a giant Brazilian bird )
– Charlie Petit
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