New dinosaur discovery in the USA

This video is called The BEST of Discovery’s Dinosaurs.

Propanoplosaurus marylandicus: A Win For Open (And Citizen) Science

By News Staff | September 14th 2011 10:05 AM

In 1997 Ray Stanford, a citizen scientist dinosaur tracker who often spent time looking for fossils close to his Maryland home, was searching a creek bed after an extensive flood and discovered a fossil which he identified as a nodosaur.

Nodosaurs have been found in diverse locations worldwide, but they’ve rarely been found in the United States. The area had originally been a flood plain, where the dinosaur originally drowned and it was tiny – only 13 cm long, just shorter than the length of a dollar bill. Adult nodosaurs are estimated to have been 20 to 30 feet long.

Stanford called up David Weishampel, Ph.D., a professor of anatomy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who works as a paleontologist and expert in dinosaur systematics. Weishampel confirmed it was a nodosaur and research since then reveals it is the youngest nodosaur ever discovered, and a new genus and species, Propanoplosaurus marylandicus, that lived approximately 110 million years ago during the Early Cretaceous Era.

Weishampel and colleagues were able to confirm the fossil’s identity as a nodosaur by identifying a distinctive pattern of bumps and grooves on the skull. They then did a computer analysis of the skull shape, comparing its proportions to those of ten skulls from different species of ankylosaurs, the group that contains nodosaurs. They found that this dinosaur was closely related to some of the nodosaur species, although it had a shorter snout overall than the others. Comparative measurements enabled them to designate the new species as Propanoplosaurus marylandicus. In addition to being the youngest nodosaur ever found, it is the first hatchling of any dinosaur species ever recovered in the eastern United States, says Weishampel. …

Stanford has donated Propanoplosaurus marylandicus to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, where it is now on display to the public and also available for research. The findings are published in the Journal of Paleontology.

See also here.

The first T. Rex Skeleton discovered over a century ago is complete at last: here.

Samples of amber in western Canada containing feathers from dinosaurs and birds have yielded the most complete story of feather evolution ever seen: here.

From Biology News Net:

A University of Alberta-led research team has taken a rare look inside the skull of a dinosaur and come away with unprecedented details on the brain and nasal passages of the 72 million year old animal.

Lead researcher Tetsuto Miyashita, a U of A master’s student in paleontology, examined the armoured skull of a Euoplocephalus, a six-metre long plant eater. The skull, which had been sitting in the U of A’s paleontology collection, was broken, allowing Miyashita and his colleagues a unique view of the interior nasal cavities and details of blood vessels.

The researchers obtained CT scans from undamaged Euoplocephalus skulls to reconstruct the twisted, looping nasal passages and brain chamber. The team concluded Euoplocephalus had good senses of smell and hearing.

The researchers say the entire brain of a Euoplocephalus would fit inside a coffee mug, but the size was not small for a dinosaur. The dinosaur may have generated sound through its looping nasal passages, enabling it to communicate with other Euoplocephalus. The reconstructed inner ear was tuned for this “nasal roar” because the length of the ear indicates that the dinosaur could pick up low-frequency sounds.

Life on Earth 240 million years ago flourished in the seas, on land, and in intricate underground burrows: here.