New dinosaur gives insight into prehistory of North America
New dinosaur reveals Mexico's wet past
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Wednesday, 13, Feb 2008 01:05
A newly-discovered dinosaur in Mexico has provided a new insight into the prehistory of the entire North American continent.
Palaeontologists say Velafrons coahuilensis, a Cretaceous-era duck-billed dinosaur which lived about 72 million years ago, is one of the first dinosaurs to ever be named in Mexico.
The country's arid climate poses problems for dinosaur hunters as low rainfall levels makes rock erosion and the subsequent revealing of fossils unlikely.
"To date, the dinosaur record from Mexico has been sparse," said Terry Gates, a palaeontologist at the Utah Museum of Natural History, which led the research team.
The palaeontologists say the discovery of Velafrons coahuilensis – a combination of the Latin and Spanish for 'sailed forehead' and the Mexican state of Coahuila in which it was found – provides a "vital" understanding into the latter history of dinosaurs in North America.
When the massive herbivore roamed modern-day Mexico 72 million years ago, high global sea levels in the late Cretaceous saw low-lying parts of central North America flooded.
These warm, shallow seas extended from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, effectively splitting the continent in two.
Velafrons coahuilensis was found in an area that in the late Cretaceous period would have been a narrow, peninsula-like landmass sandwiched by seas on the east and mountains on the west.
The dinosaur belongs to the hadrosaur family, which was categorised by dwelling in wet climates and distinctive duck-bills, suggesting late Cretaceous Mexico was part of a humid estuary where salt water mixed with freshwater rivers.
In addition, its bones were discovered covered with snails and marine clams.
Don Brinkman, a project researcher from Canada's Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, commented: "Dinosaurs from this particular period are important because this is a time that is relatively poorly understood.
"The locality in Mexico goes a long way to filling in a gap in our knowledge of the record of changes in dinosaur assemblages throughout the late Cretaceous era."
The findings have been published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.