Newly Discovered Dinosaur May Have Spent Part of Its Life Underground: NPR

Artistic impression of Vona Herzogay.

Jorge Gonzalez

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Jorge Gonzalez

A new dinosaur discovery has intrigued paleontologists – and it was a digger.

It was found in Utah by researchers and paleontologists from North Carolina State University, Vona Herzogay It was a small, plant-eating dinosaur that lived during the Cenomanian period – about 100 to 66 million years ago.

“If you took the tail of a Komodo dragon and attached it to the back of an ostrich, that’s kind of what Vona “It could have looked like that,” researcher Haviv Avrahami told NPR.

Avrahami is a doctoral student at North Carolina State University and was part of the team that identified this new dinosaur. They published their research in the scientific journal anatomical record This month.

Instead of thinking about how big it is Vona It might make more sense to think about how long she was there, Avrahami says.

“It was a small dinosaur. It was about seven feet long, so it was probably as tall as Chuck if he was lying down,” Avrahami said.

Avrahami and his team also believe that this new dinosaur was a burrowing species, spending at least part of its life underground.

Paleontologists know little about small, plant-eating dinosaurs like Vona. This is why they are so important in understanding how dinosaurs lived underground, ate, and interacted socially.

“Their family tree, basically, is like a giant black hole of paleontological knowledge,” Avrahami said.

Habib Afrahamy holding a 3D print Vona Skull.

North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences

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North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences

The researcher also had a hand in the naming. Vona Dinosaur. He said that while many dinosaur species were named after Anglo-Saxon conventions, Vona It was named after Avrahami’s mother’s hometown: Guam.

“the name Vona “The word ‘soul’ comes from the creation myth of our ancestors, which is about the soul of a brother and sister,” Avrahami said.

“Fona is the sister and Pontan is the brother. When Pontan dies, Fona uses his body parts to create the pieces of the universe and the pieces of the island. At the end of this, she herself dies and becomes petrified, and from her petrified body the Chamorro people arise.”

“I thought this story was so wonderful because it so closely mirrored the life of Vona dinosaur, because Vona It was found in a burrow, so it had close family ties, and was also preserved within the ground.

Avrahami hopes his team’s discovery will help them learn more about this small, earth-burrowing dinosaur and the life it lived millions of years ago.