Illustration of Enigmacursor mollyborthwickae, a newly recognised dinosaur species 漏 The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London
A newly discovered species of dinosaur is going on display in London鈥檚 .
Enigmacursor mollyborthwickae was a speedy, two-legged herbivore, 64 centimetres tall and 180 cm long that lived about 145 million to 150 million years ago, during the Late Jurassic Period.
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Its reconstructed skeleton will be on display in the museum鈥檚 Earth Hall from聽26 June, alongside its contemporary, .
and , both palaeontologists at the Natural History Museum, have analysed the Enigmacursor specimen, which was uncovered from the in the western US in 2021-22.
Back then, it was thought to be a Nanosaurus 鈥 a poorly known species of small herbivorous dinosaur. The Enigmacursor fossil isn鈥檛 complete, but using the few teeth 鈥 which reveal it ate plants 鈥 and portions of the neck, backbone, tail, pelvis, limbs and feet, Maidment and Barrett have defined this fossil as a new species, placed it in an evolutionary tree and reconstructed it for display.
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They have based the structure of missing elements, like the skull, on similar small dinosaurs like and Hexinlusaurus. Generally, we know little about smaller dinosaurs, both because they are less likely to fossilise than bigger animals and because fossil hunters tend to seek larger, more valuable examples.
鈥淭his is a two-legged dinosaur and it鈥檚 got very small forearms that it probably would have used to grasp food to bring it to its mouth,鈥 says Maidment. 鈥淎nd it鈥檚 got incredibly large feet and very long limbs. So, it was probably quite fast by dinosaur standards.鈥
The Enigmacursor skeleton at the Natural History Museum in London 漏 The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London
That is where the 鈥渃ursor鈥 part of its name comes from: it means 鈥渞unner鈥. Maidment says it was probably charging around in the shadows of behemoths like Diplodocus and Stegosaurus.
The specimen鈥檚 vertebrae weren鈥檛 fused, which implies it wasn鈥檛 fully mature when it died. 鈥淚 think this animal was probably a teenager, but it may well have been sexually mature, so it might not have got that much bigger,鈥 says Maidment.
鈥Enigmacursor represents one of the rarities from further down the food chain of the dinosaur era,鈥 says at the University of Cambridge. 鈥淭his newly described animal was clearly a small, wallaby-sized herbivore that scampered around the Late Jurassic countryside.鈥
The discovery sheds light on the early evolutionary stages of the herbivorous dinosaurs that would go on to dominate Cretaceous ecosystems in North America, says Maidment, and helps us build a more realistic ecological picture of the life and times of dinosaurs.
Journal reference:
Royal Society Open Science
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