In the Australian outback, a team of paleontologists has identified a new species of dinosaur near the town of Lightning Ridge , about 724 kilometers northwest of Sydney.
While the discovery of a new dinosaur is a common announcement somewhere in the world, it is the first time that bones of a herd of dinosaurs have been found in Australia. Even more remarkable, they have all been found in opal, including the most complete opalized dinosaur skeleton ever found.
The fossils are oddly colored, have an unusual blue-gray hue with occasional flashes of bright color, and belong to an astonishing new species of herbivorous dinosaur, the researchers report in a paper published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology .
Compared to other continents, Australia has not stood out for its great performance in the face of dinosaur hunters, since only 10 species are known and most of them have only been preserved thanks to a few bones. However, some of these fossil discoveries, both from dinosaurs and other Cretaceous species, were turned into opal, giving them an unworldly beauty almost unknown elsewhere.
The truth is that it takes a very specific set of circumstances for silicate-rich minerals to seep through a substrate and create opals. Fortunately, the most favorable combination of chemical and climatic conditions occurred around the Eromanga Sea, inhabited by plesiosaurs and giant ichthyosaurs, and whose shores were ideal homes for dinosaurs.
He was looking for opals and he found dinosaurs
Bob Foster, an opal miner from Lightning Ridge in New South Wales, found the bones that have proven so valuable to science. To encourage the poor quality of opalisation, the bones became a frustrating nuisance – viewed from an opals hunter’s point of view – preventing their access to high-value stones that change color under different lights. For paleontologists, however, its price was above rubies.
Some of the nearly 100 bones found at Lightning Ridge have been on display to museum visitors for decades, but paleontologists had a hard time putting them together to scientifically describe the find. Eventually, they figured out that this happened because they were dealing with one adult dinosaur and three juveniles, not a single individual. Most of the bones from each of the dinosaurs are missing, but somehow all four sets of shoulders have survived so many centuries.
The new species of dinosaurs has been named Fostoria dhimbangunmal in honor of Foster and a translation into the local Aboriginal language of sheepyard , a popular name for the place where they were found. A large number of F. dhimbangunmal bones have been found, all covered in opal, an unprecedented number in Australia.
“Initially we assumed it was a single skeleton, but when I started looking at some of the bones, I realized that we had four scapulae (shoulder blades) from animals of different sizes,” said Phil Bell, principal investigator at the University of New England in Australia, in a statement.
Fostoria was a plant-eating iguanodontian dinosaur that, according to the Australian university, was closely related to the more well-known Muttaburrasaurus species in central Queensland during 1980.
The remains discovered by Robert Foster in the 1980s include parts of four skeletons: small juvenile dinosaurs and larger creatures, which could have been about 5 meters long. Not being well-armored dinosaurs, they likely used herds as a defense against predators.
Lightning Ridge is the only place in the world where dinosaur bones are normally turned into opal. Precious opal emits a rainbow of colors; in the case of the jaw, it emits a bright green and blue light. However, many of the remains are often found in mining, because they settle in rock strata that are 30 meters underground.
“The mining process breaks the fossils into fragments, but on the other hand, we would never be able to see even those fragments if it weren’t for mining,” Bell said.
Last year, another new species of dinosaur was identified at Lightning Ridge, but it had to be described from a single jaw.
Lightning Ridge fossils often arrive at museums in poor condition, as even if the bones survived 100 million years since they were deposited intact, they often break in the process from being immersed in opal mines.
Referencia: Fostoria dhimbangunmal, gen. et sp. nov., a new iguanodontian (Dinosauria, Ornithopoda) from the mid-Cretaceous of Lightning Ridge, New South Wales, Australia Phil R. Bell, Tom Brougham, Matthew C. Herne , Timothy Frauenfelder & Elizabeth T. Smith. Article: e1564757 | Received 15 May 2018, Accepted 26 Sep 2018, Published online: 03 Jun 2019 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02724634.2019.1564757
Crédito imagen: James Kuether (ilustración).
