A newly discovereddinosaurin Utah is thought to have dwell in a fourth dimension of braggart environmental change and stood on the edge of a period of rapid warming on Planet Earth . Iani smithidates back close to 99 million year and lived in what is now Utah during the mid - Cretaceous .
Iani smithiis a limited find for a number of reasons . The partial skeleton , which included skull , spine , and limbs , as well as jaw and teeth , was found in the Mussentuchit Member , Cedar Mountain Formation , Utah , act not just the first discovery of this finical dinosaur coinage but also the first disk of an ornithopod dinosaur in the Late Cretaceous discover in North America and the first later Cretaceous rhabdodontomorph found in North America ever .
“ FindingIaniwas a streak of destiny . We make out something like it lived in this ecosystem because stray tooth had been accumulate here and there , but we were n’t expecting to stumble upon such a beautiful frame , especially from this time in Earth ’s history . have a nearly complete skull was priceless for piecing the chronicle together , ” Lindsay Zanno , associate research prof at North Carolina State University , brain of fossilology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences , and correspond author of the work , said in astatement .
Despite being a dinosaur with a powerful jaw , Ianiwas actually thought to be a herbivorous dino who used that firm jaw and tooth to chew through fibrous industrial plant and leave .
After perform analysis on the skull , jaw bone , and teeth , the team were surprised to study that their new discovery was in reality a rhabdodontomorph , a clade of dinosaur almost only found in Europe and have intercourse from a small number of fossils in Australia . With this new find , the squad thought around five clades of dinosaur lived together in the ecosystem of North America and were present in the changing catamenia between the other – Late Cretaceous boundary .
“ We recoveredIanias an other rhabdodontomorph , a lineage of ornithopods know almost exclusively from Europe , ” Zanno said . " IfIaniholds up as a rhabdodontomorph , it raises a hatful of cool questions . "
Ianiis named after the papistical god Janus with two faces , said to symbolise transitions . This melodic theme is particularly given given the time full stop the team think this dinosaur live in . The mid - Cretaceous saw a lot of changes in ecosystems triggered by increasing carbon dioxide in the atmospheric state and rising sea levels . This finally take to a worldwide temperature stiletto heel dubbed the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum . Smaller Edwin Herbert Land masses meant less way for the dinosaurs to live on and it was so warm that rainforests were able-bodied to flourish at the poles .
This pave the way for the end of the sovereignty of the large dinosaurs , such as the gargantuan sauropods , but we began to see the salary increase of early duckbills such asParasaurolophusandEdmontosaurus , of whichIanimight have been an early ancestor .
“ This dinosaur stand on the precipice , ” Zanno said , “ able-bodied to look back at the way North American ecosystems were in the past , but close enough to see the futurity coming like a hummer train . I opine we can all relate to that . ”
The paper is publish inPLOS One .
