New Dinosour Found in Texas

New dinosaur species found in Texas

Washington: Scientists have discovered a new plant-eating species of bony-skulled dinosaur, as big as a medium sized dog, in Texas.

        The species with a softball sized hump of solid bone on top of its skull had lived 70 to 80 million years ago.

        Paleontologists led by Nicholas Longrich of Yale found two skull fragments in Big Bend National Park in Texas in 2008. They compared them to fossils from related species in Canada and Montana before confirming that the fossils represented a new genus of pachycephalosaur, a group of bipedal, thick skulled dinosaurs.

          The researchers named the new species Texacephale loangstoni. 'Texacephale' means 'Texas head' and 'langstoni' is in honour of Wann Langston, a fellow paleontologist. The new species is one of about a dozen known to have solid lumps of bone on top of their skulls, which Longrich speculates was probably used to ram one another head on in a manner similar to modern-day musk oxen and cape buffalo.

         the discovery of the new species lends further weight to the idea, which has gained popularity in recent years, that dinosaurs found in Canada and the northern States were distinct from their southern neighbours.

         Because fossils from the Big Bend region are rare and tend to be poorly preserved, scientists do not have a complete picture of the different species that once inhabited the area, Longrich said.

        But the team may have uncovered an important piece of the puzzle with their discovery. They found that this particular group of dinosaurs, which was previously thought to have originated in Asia, likely evolved in north America.