Image courtesy of © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London
Joel Kontinen
Some
evolutionists believe that the dinosaurs are divided into too many clans but
now it seem that they have overrated it and that there are not so much different
dinosaurs at all.
Enigmacursor darted
around North America in the Late Jurassic 145-150 million years ago and its
skeleton now be on display in London’s Natural History Museum
A newly
discovered species of dinosaur is going on display in London’s Natural
History Museum.
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.
Its
reconstructed skeleton will be on display in the museum’s Earth Hall
from 26 June, alongside its contemporary, Sophie the Stegosaurus.
Susannah
Maidment and Paul Barrett, both palaeontologists at the Natural
History Museum, have analysed the Enigmacursor specimen, which was
uncovered from the Morrison Formation in the western US in 2021-22.
Back then,
it was thought to be a Nanosaurus – a poorly known species of small
herbivorous dinosaur. The Enigmacursor fossil isn’t complete, but
using the few teeth – which reveal it ate plants – 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.
They have
based the structure of missing elements, like the skull, on similar small
dinosaurs like Yandusaurus 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.
“This is a
two-legged dinosaur and it’s got very small forearms that it probably would
have used to grasp food to bring it to its mouth,” says Maidment. “And it’s got
incredibly large feet and very long limbs. So, it was probably quite fast by
dinosaur standards.”
That is
where the “cursor” part of its name comes from: it means “runner”. Maidment
says it was probably charging around in the shadows of behemoths like Diplodocus and Stegosaurus.
The
specimen’s vertebrae weren’t fused, which implies it wasn’t fully mature
when it died. “I think this animal was probably a teenager, but it may well
have been sexually mature, so it might not have got that much bigger,” says
Maidment.
“Enigmacursor represents
one of the rarities from further down the food chain of the dinosaur era,”
says David Norman at the University of Cambridge. “This newly
described animal was clearly a small, wallaby-sized herbivore that scampered
around the Late Jurassic countryside.”
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.
Source:
Chris Simms 2025
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