Rare baby dinosaur
Such a find was made by noted Canadian paleontologist Dr Phillip J. Currie in 2010 and the details were published this week in the Journal of Vertebrae Paleontology. Dr. Currie, of the Univ. of Alberta, and his team were working on a site in Dinosaur Provincial Park when he spotted what at first he believed to be the fossil of an ancient turtle.
It did not take long for Dr. Currie to realize that what he had found was not a turtle but something far more rare and of far greater value to the world of paleontology — an infant Chasmosaurus, a baby version of a horned dinosaur that lived roughly 75 million years ago.
It was fully intact and they believe the 1.5 metre creature likely drowned. Had it lived it would have grown to 5 metres. A fozzilized baby dinosaur is rare, a fossilized baby Chasmosaurus is unheard of.
“The little ones don’t preserve as well as the big ones (and now) for the first time ever we have a complete skeleton of a baby ceratopsid.” Dr. Currie said. “Not only has (a young Chasmosaurus) never been found here, it’s never been found, period.”
Benefit of fossil
Dr. Currie, a curator at, and one of the creators of, the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alberta, said the fossilized dinosaur he found was three years old and that it has provided new information on horned dinosaurs.
“One of the greatest benefits is that we can now look at the different body proportions for Chasmosaurus as it grew up,” Dr. Currie said. “We now have an anchor point with the baby that we can compare with all other specimens of this species.
“From that comparison we can calculate the dimensions, body weights, and ages for all other ceratopsid species,” he added. “We can start filling in missing pieces.”
In the near future he will be studying the brain of the creature using an advanced CT scan in Japan. The wee Chasmosaurus — they’ve named it Chasm — is one of the oldest “babies” known to humankind.
