The fossil bones of a dinosaur so tiny it could dart between the legs of its huge neighbors are being assembled at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and scientists there are excited about its history.
The little creature weighed less than 2 pounds and was only 28 inches long from its fierce little jaws to the end of its long tail.
Although its name is Fruitadens - fruit teeth - it probably ate all kinds of food. It likely ate plants most of the time, but bugs and other small animals, as well, said Luis Chiappe, director of the museum's Dinosaur Institute.
The first details of the dinosaur's life and evolution are being published this week in the British scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, and Chiappe is overseeing construction of a detailed, full-scale model of the animal that will take another two years to complete, he said in a phone interview Tuesday.
"It's the smallest species of dinosaur ever found in North America," Chiappe said, "and it lived about 150 million years ago - one of the most primitive of all the dinosaurs, living right at the base of the dinosaur evolutionary tree."
Bones of four individual creatures were found near Fruita, Colo., more than 30 years ago by dinosaur hunters from Cal State Long Beach. The Los Angeles County museum has stored them ever since. A team of specialists, including Chiappe and led by Richard Butler of the Bavarian State Paleontology Collection in Munich, has analyzed them and described their technical details.
"It tells you once again how dinosaurs can range in size, from 2-pound animals like Fruitadens to creatures weighing 50 tons or more like plant-eating sauropods like Brachiosaurus, or the meat-eaters like the theropod Allosaurus."
The slightly built, agile little dinosaur belongs to a class of creatures known as heterodontosaurids, whose unusually shaped teeth - some sharp and some leaf-shaped - indicate it was most probably omnivorous, Chiappe said.
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Itsy bitsy NORTH AMERICAN heterodontosaurids!
All of you jerks that got to go to London probably knew about this one. :P
Heterodontosaurs are my favourite after ceratopsians. :)
Ok. Question. Why no orinthschian carnivores? Theropods too good? But then why did the uber sized pterosaurs start becoming stalking ground feeders?
2 comments:
Yeah, heard about this at SVP. *snicker*
Cute little guy. Bill Parker notes that its femur is surprisingly similar to coelophysoids. That probably doesn't mean anything too sinister.
My question is why is Fruitadens, in every picture and reference I see to it, portrayed as scaly when 1) its a heterodontosaurid, the exact type of ornithischian that we found protofeathers on, and 2) very small, the kind of animal we would expect integument on.
"surprisingly similar to coelophysoids."
Its a heterodontosaurid. They're kind of near the base of the dino family tree (depending on who you talk to). So yeah, they would have some primitive traits.
Fruitadens actually has been floating around for a while, just under the moniker "the Fruita jaws". This is just its formal naming.
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