WASHINGTON: A British-based researcher has identified the skeletal remains of a horned dinosaur that was recovered from eastern North America and kept at Yale University.
Dr. Nick Longrich, a dinosaur expert from the University of Bath’s Milner Centre for Evolution examined a jawbone fragment of a dog-sized dinosaur that was being stored at Yale’s Peabody Museum.
He identified the remains as that of a Ceratopsia, a creature that existed during the Late Cretaceous era, around 66 million to 100 million years ago.
Before the formation of what is now known as the present-day continent of North America, it used to be part of a large mass of land that was populated by different kinds of dinosaurs.
However, this larger continent was later split into two by the Western Interior Seaway, which ran from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.
During this drastic shift in land mass, the dinosaur inhabitants were separated as well. Those that were caught in the western part of the continent are called Laramidia.
Creatures that were caught in the eastern portion, however, remained largely unidentified because of the high vegetation in the region that kept scientists from recovering their fossils.
The jawbone fragment that Longrich examined is considered to be the first fossil of such dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous era ever to be recovered from North American’s eastern part.
