Dinosaur news

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Back in September, paleontologists had unearthed a new species of burrowing dinosaur that once walked on two legs some 125 million years ago (during Aptian or Barremian age, in the Early Cretaceous epoch or lower Cretaceous series) in the beds of modern-day Lujiatun (Liaoning Province, China), reported Jon Haworth for ABC News. A new paper describing the species, published this month in the journal PeerJ, argues it is the most primitive ornithopod—the family of dinosaurs that includes bipedal “duck-billed” species such as Iguanodon—ever found: https://peerj.com/articles/9832/, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-new...180975903/, https://abcnews.go.com/International/spe...d=73141707, http://www.sci-news.com/paleontology/cha...08860.html

Found in northeastern China’s Liaoning Province, researchers named the dinosaur Changmiania liaoningensis, after the serene postures of the two almost perfectly preserved skeletons that underpin the discovery—changmian means “eternal sleep” in Chinese. The digging dino’s near-immaculate fossilization may have been the result of an unpleasant demise. Some researchers suggest a volcanic eruption likely trapped the nearly four-foot-long Changmiania underground where it may have suffocated or starved to death.

Figure 1 by Yang et al.: https://peerj.com/articles/9832/
(A) Holotype PMOL AD00114 in dorsal view;
(B) anterior part of the holotype PMOL AD00114 in caudolateral view;
© referred specimen PMOL LFV022 in dorsal view. Red arrows indicate the emplacement of the gastrolith clusters.
   

One of two perfectly preserved fossil skeletons of Changmiania liaoningensis, and an artist's rendering of the species, credit: Carine Ciselet of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences:
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