Source: Phys.Org
Of the 4 footed, millions of years old variety. On Dead Things, Gemma Tarlach remarks on a find named Zuul crurivastator, a new member of the ankylosaur, or club-tailed herbivores:
The new-to-science dinosaur’s genus name reflects its block-headed, short-snouted resemblance to Ghostbusters’ Terror Dogs. But that vicious tail club inspired its species name, crurivastator, which translates to “destroyer of shins.”
Destroyer of shins. Heh.
Heh, indeed. But this is a specially cool find:
The virtually complete, partially mummified specimen was unearthed in 2014 and is still being prepared. Researchers started at either end (the spectacularly well-preserved skull and tail club) and are working their way toward the middle. In about two years, when the work should be complete, lead author Victoria Arbour of the Royal Ontario Museum and the University of Toronto thinks Zuul will measure about six meters, or 20 feet nose to club.
Stegosaurus Ungulates
Source: National Park Service
Nearly complete, details in place (unlike Stegosaurus, wherein the paleontologists first thought those plates would act like a roof), and even the possibility of recovering proteins. Proteins from an estimated 75 millions years ago.
Makes me feel like a kid again.
And, in honor of my late friend Nancy, who loved to eat dinner with a bunch of computer geeks and listen to them geek out (her eyes would cross and she’d start drooling, she claimed), here’s a bit of tech talk from the academic paper, from The Royal Society:
6. Skull
The skull is complete, missing only the tip of the right quadratojugal horn and the ventral edge of the vomers (figures 2, 3 and 5). The skull has undergone plastic deformation, with some dorsoventral compaction and mediolateral skewing evidenced by the bilateral asymmetry of the skull overall, and flattened, oval orbits [33]. The lateral sides of the snout taper gently towards a squared-off premaxillary beak. Laterally, the skull is relatively flat dorsally, unlike the arched profile of some specimens of Euoplocephalus, Anodontosaurus, Scolosaurus and Ziapelta, but this might result from taphonomic compaction of the skull. As in other ankylosaurines, the antorbital fenestra is absent and the supratemporal fenestrae are obscured. In dorsal view, the skull has a trapezoidal outline. Apart from the three known skulls of Ankylosaurus (AMNH 5214, AMNH 5895 and CMN 8880), ROM 75860 is the largest ankylosaurine skull recovered from Laramidia (table 1).
