New Beaked Dinosaur Species Found in Utah #fossil #paleontology #dinosaur #cretaceous #utah

Iani smithi Jorge Gonzalez

Smithsonian Magazine has a story about a newly discovered dinosaur.  The beaked dinosaur is called Iani smithi after the Roman god Ianus and paleontologist Joshua Aaron Smith.  It lived about 99 million years ago in Utah and adds detail to a fossil gap in the middle Cretaceous.  The animal was described by North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences paleontologist Lindsay Zanno and her colleagues.  Lindsay spoke to ESCONI a few times while she worked at the Field Museum.

At a glance, the dinosaur might seem somewhat plain. Iani lacks any horns, plates, spikes or other outstanding features that we often associate with dinosaurs. The details of the reptile’s skeleton, however, identify Iani as a rhabdodontomorph—a little-known group of herbivorous dinosaurs that were only recognized in 2016.

“I was really skeptical about that identification,” Zanno says, but that uncertainty led the researchers to be extra careful in their analysis. “Skepticism is what makes good science, so I spent a long time scrutinizing the anatomy and our analyses,” she adds. Iani shares some traits with other rhabdodontomorphs that can’t be denied, she says, particularly features of its teeth and skull. These dinosaurs, like the 8-foot long Zalmoxes from Romania and the 26-foot-long Muttaburrasaurus from Australia, make up a group of small- to medium-sized herbivores that spread around the world during the Cretaceous in the days before the more familiar duckbilled dinosaurs evolved.