A brand new species of dinosaurs has been discovered in Texas, having lived around 96 million years ago.
The new species, named Ampelognathus coheni, is a small plant-eating dinosaur, making it a rare find for North Texas where few herbivorous species have been uncovered.
The dinosaur was first unearthed in 2020 when a small 2-inch-long section of fossilized jawbone was discovered near Lake Grapevine on the outskirts of Dallas-Fort Worth. It has has only now been confirmed as a whole new species, a paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology reveals.
The paleontologists from the Perot Museum of Nature and Science estimate that this new herbivorous dinosaur would have been around the size of a border collie, weighing between 20 and 60 pounds.
The species' name roughly translates to "Cohen's Grapevine jaw," named for the region it was found in, and Murray Cohen, the volunteer who unearthed the jawbone.
Initially, the paleontologists who were investigating the area thought the bone belonged to a small crocodile, but soon discovered that it was in fact the remains of a whole new species of dinosaur.
"The place where this particular fossil was found has actually produced a huge number of fossil bits and pieces of a LOT of different plants and animals across the full spectrum of the ancient ecosystem that once lived there," Ron Tykoski, vice president of science at the Perot, told Newsweek. "However, if you were to draw a circle about a mile in diameter with this spot in the middle, there are bones of the dinosaur Protohadros byrdi known from a couple of different places inside that circle, at least two or three fossil bird locations (birds are dinosaurs), at least one or two spots with pieces of small theropod dinosaurs (theropods were the carnivorous dinosaurs), and a couple small armor plates of an armored dinosaur of some kind."
They also found that it wasn't simply a smaller specimen of an established species, as its jaw anatomy didn't match any of the other dinosaurs that had been found in the area.
"The newly described dentary is similar in overall form to those of non-iguanodontian ornithopods such as Nanosaurus agilis, Hypsilophodon foxii, Changchunsaurus parvus, and Haya griva," the authors wrote in the paper. "However, the combination of low coronoid process, number of dentary tooth positions, lack of diastema between predentary contact and first dentary alveolus, proportions and orientation of predentary facets, and torsion of the dentary on its long axis distinguish it from these other taxa."
The fossilized jaw has now been added to the collections of the Perot Museum. This new species marks only the fourth dinosaur to be discovered in this area of Texas, with the previous being uncovered in 2010. The paleontologists hope that this discovery of the first small, plant-eating dinosaur in North Texas may shed light on the ecology of the area during this geological period, as the fossil record has been sparse thus far.
"The record is so sparse for a couple of reasons. First is because there are so few places in our area where rocks of this age (96 million years old) and kind (laid down in terrestrial or shoreline settings) were deposited in North America," Tykoski said. "There are plenty of marine-deposited rocks known from this time, because global sea levels were very high, much more than today, which flooded larges parts of continents at the time. But that also means there weren't too many places where rivers and streams of the time (96 million years ago) were able to deposit their sediments eroded from the lands, which means land-living plants and animals had less chance of being buried and preserved.
"Another reason is because there are not many places in central and eastern North America where the right kind and age of rocks are openly exposed. Unlike the widespread and open badlands of the mountainous western interior, we here in north Texas and surrounding areas have extensive vegetation covering the landscape, with only very small and isolated places where the rocks 'peek out' and can be investigated (such as creek beds, construction projects, road cuts, etc.). That makes it hard to find things!"
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Update 11/9/23, 11:40 a.m. ET: This article was updated with comment from Ron Tykoski.
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