A 100 million year old dinosaur has been unearthed.
The newly discovered ancestor of Thescelosaurus provides evidence that these animals spent at least some of their time in underground burrows.
New Dinosaur, Phona [/Foat’NAH/] The Herzogae lived 99 million years ago in what is now Utah. At the time, the area was a vast floodplain ecosystem between a huge inland sea to the east and active volcanoes and mountains to the west. It was a warm, wet, muddy environment with numerous rivers and streams.
Paleontologists from North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences excavated this fossil, along with other specimens of the same species, in the Mussenchutchit Formation of the Cedar Mountain Formation in early 2013.
The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences told WRAL News that it has the actual skeleton, a 3D printed model of the skull and scientific illustrations of what it would look like once fleshed out.
Phona was a small, herbivorous dinosaur about the size of a large dog, with a simple build and none of the flashy features of its more ornamented relatives, such as horned, armored, or crowned dinosaurs. But that doesn’t mean Phona was a boring dinosaur.
The genus name Fona comes from a creation story of the Chamorro ancestors, the indigenous people of Guam and the Mariana Islands in the Pacific. Fona and Pontan were brother and sister explorers who discovered the island and became land and air. The species name was chosen to honor Lisa Herzog, manager of paleontology operations at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, for her outstanding contributions and dedication to the field of paleontology.
“I wanted to pay homage to the indigenous mythology of Guam, where my Chamorro ancestors came from,” said Habib Abrahami, a doctoral student at North Carolina State University and digital technician for the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences’ new “Dueling Dinosaurs” program. “In the myth, when the fauna died, they became part of the land and new life sprang from their bodies. To me, this ties into fossilization, beauty and creation. The fauna would have been covered in colorful feathers. The species name is named after Lisa Hertzog, who was essential to this study and discovered the rarest specimen of the fauna, consisting of several individuals preserved together in what was probably a burrow.”
Researchers believe that phonas hold the key to improving our understanding of Cretaceous ecosystems.
“Fonas give us insight into the three-dimensional space that animals could occupy as they moved through the earth,” Abrahami said, “adding to the richness of the fossil record and expanding the known diversity of small herbivores, a crucial yet poorly understood component of Cretaceous ecosystems.”