FOSSIL REVEALS “ONE OF THE CUTEST DINOSAURS” EVER
Some 20 years ago, someone smuggled dinosaur eggs from Argentina to the United States illegally. The smuggler probably had little clue that inside one of the eggs was one of the best- preserved skulls of a dinosaur embryo ever found, which is now giving us new insight into the facial appearance of one line of our planet’s erstwhile rulers.
“When I had a look at this specimen, I quickly realized how unique this is,” said Martin Kundrát, a paleobiologist at the Center for Interdisciplinary Biosciences at Pavol Jozef Safarik University in Kosice, Slovakia, the lead author of a study published Thursday in Current Biology about the fossil.
The skull is about the size of a table grape. Its right side is still entombed in mudstone and siltstone, and its mouth is closed. It isn’t deformed, which is so often the case with bones buried in rock for millions and millions of years, and so it gives a first- of- its- kind glimpse into the start of life of a dinosaur that is part of a group called the titanosaurs — long- neck dinosaurs that reached weights of 70 tons and lengths of 122 feet. And it has some surprises: It sports a horn on its nose, and its eye sockets face forward, like human eyes.
“I was pretty floored. I thought it was an amazing discovery,” said Michael D’Emic, a vertebrate paleontologist and sauropod expert at Adelphi University in New York who was not involved in the new work but has studied other sauropod embryos from Patagonia.
“Just to have that sort of level of detail and preserved in 3- D was just astonishing to me,” he said.
Kundrát first saw the skull in 2011, and began making detailed 3- D scans of it. The scans let Kundrát and his team see the skull as a whole without damaging it.
Kundrát and his team plan to repatriate the skull to Argentina.
“This is a part of their national paleontological heritage,” Kundrát said.