A group of North Carolina paleontologists have identified a unique new species of dinosaurs – one that spent at least part of its time living in underground burrows.
Researchers from North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences unearthed the new dinosaur Fona herzogae in Utah in 2013.
A paper outlining the discovery was published last week.
Haviv Avrahami is a Ph.D. student at NC State and digital technician for the Dueling Dinosaurs program at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. He said it’s a plant-eating dinosaur about the size of a very tall human.
“Fona was a lot smaller than what we're used to with dinosaurs, which are usually really, really big,” he said, “But Fona was still about 7 feet long. So, what would have been about as long horizontally as Shack is tall vertically and it would have been able to fit on a king size bed with a little bit of its tail probably hanging off the edge.”
He said they determined Fona herzogae was an underground dweller because its bones are shaped in a way that made it really good at digging, with strong shoulders and arms, legs and hips, "And it also had really freakishly large feet for the rest of its body, which probably acted like a shovel to kick bucket loads of dirt outside of its home.”
Avrahami said the first, or genus, name Fona comes from the ancestral creation story of the Chamorro people, who are the indigenous populations of Guam and the Pacific Mariana Islands.
"She threw her body into the earth and became fossilized and from her petrified body came forth new life in the form of Chamorro people,” he explained.
The species name honors Lisa Herzog, the paleontology operations manager at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.
He said, “She's one of been one of my closest confidants and allies and friends since I first started doing paleontology back in 2014, which was right after around the time that I dropped out of high school and I started going back to college at Wake Technical Community College and getting interested in science again.”
Avrahami said Fona is key to expanding understanding of the ecosytems of the Cretaceous period, the time 100 million years ago when the creature would have lived.
New dinosaur! Meet Fona herzogae, a new small bodied thescelosaurine from Cedar Mountain Fm, Utah. It fills a gap in our understanding of early diverging ornithischians, revealing they were well-established in N. America by the Cenomanian
— The Anatomical Record (@AnatRecord) July 9, 2024
Avrahami et al: https://t.co/0tYX4uM42v pic.twitter.com/13rLkr3lsm
