Giant dinosaur skeleton is unearthed in US state: ‘Incredibly unusual’ 30ft Cretaceous-era monster is nearly intact in ‘rare’ find dating back 80MILLION years

The most complete dinosaur fossil ever discovered in Mississippi has been called “incredibly unusual” by state officials. It remains 85 percent buried since its discovery in 2007.

Paleontologists have confirmed that the specimen was once a living hadrosaur: a family of vegetarian, duck-billed dinosaurs that lived more than 82 million years ago.

But the hadrosaur is a large family of plant-eating giants, including at least 61 identified individual species, with possibly hundreds of unique species once roaming the Earth, experts say.

Researchers have secured parts of the vertebrae, parts of the forearm, feet and pelvic bones of this specimen, but the rest has proven difficult to excavate outside of Booneville in the northeastern part of the state.

“This thing sat idle for a while because we didn’t have anyone to work on it,” admitted James Starnes, an official with the state geological bureau.

It has been a mystery for nearly two decades which of the many hadrosaur species was the one found in this Booneville, Mississippi find.

But researchers are now using a 3D method of forensic bone analysis to solve the mystery before it is fully excavated.

Derek Hoffman, a geology student at the University of Southern Mississippi (USM), is now analyzing the hadrosaur remains using this method, known in several scientific disciplines as “geometric morphometrics.”

“What geometric morphometrics does,” as Hoffman simplified it, “is use a shape-analysis approach.”

For a given bone sample, the key features or ‘landmarks’ are determined and the respective distances and the ratios of those distances are then compared using complex statistical models to confirm differences and similarities with known bones.

The method has also proven its effectiveness in anthropology and in studies of human evolution, including comparisons between the brain cavities of modern humans and our Neanderthal ancestors.

But Hoffman’s search for answers about this hadrosaur fossil is complicated by the fact that some pieces of the creature are in the hands of private collectors.

Hoffman’s work focuses primarily on the bones publicly preserved by the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science.

“We have quite a few vertebrae,” George Phillips, the museum’s curator of paleontology, told the local newspaper Clarion ledger‘We have one humerus.’

“We have one ulna. The ulna is the back of the forearm.”

“We have a number of foot bones,” Phillips continued. “And then we have the pubic bone.”

The adult hadrosaur’s ulna is about two feet long, and its humerus is about a foot and a half long. And with just one complete, adult hadrosaur’s foot bone, the total weight could be well over 50 pounds.

But the dinosaur’s skull, the most unique feature to distinguish hadrosaur species, has still not been found, much to the frustration of researchers.

It is known that different species of hadrosaurs evolved with a wide variety of crowns on their duckbill heads, even with floppy material like the red ‘comb’ of a rooster.

Paleontologists still debate the biological purpose of these unusual and sometimes showy features, but their variety has contributed to the recorded diversity of the hadrosaur family.

USM’s Hoffman has focused on the dinosaur’s pubis, a bone from the front of the pelvis, as the second-best choice for identifying the species in this fossil.

Although the differences between the pubic bones of hadrosaur species are subtle, often too subtle for the naked human eye, the hidden differences can still be revealed using rigorous mathematical approaches such as geometric morphometrics.

The USM geology student hopes to at least narrow down the number of potential hadrosaur species this Mississippi fossil could be.

Or, “What’s the lowest taxonomic level we can take this hadrosaur to,” as Hoffman put it.

What we know now about this particular hadrosaur is that it was probably about 7.5 to 8 meters long and about 5 meters tall when it stood on its hind legs.

Although researchers believe the hadrosaur lineage originated in North America, the herbivores eventually migrated all over the world. Fossils have been found in Asia, South America, Europe, and North Africa.

“They are without a doubt the best represented dinosaurs in the fossil record,” Hoffman said.

The name hadrosaurs is derived from the Ancient Greek for “sturdy lizard,” and the heavy animals actually ranged from approximately 2.2 to 4.4 US tons (or between 2,000 and 4,000 kilograms).

Many hadrosaur species lived between 75 and 65 million years ago, in the Late Cretaceous.

Other examples of dinosaurs from the hadrosaur family include the Parasaurolophuswhich had a long, backward-curving crest on its head and appears in the 2022 film ‘Jurassic World Dominion’, and the Edmontosauruswho had the aforementioned comb, made of soft tissue, just like a rooster.

State official James Starnes, with the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality’s Office of Geology, said the discovery of this hadrosaur in 2007 near Booneville was just “‘Incredibly unusual.’

“We just don’t have a lot of skeletons,” Starnes said. “We have pieces and parts, but no skeleton.”

Starnes hopes that despite the nearly two decades it has taken to excavate just a fraction of this hadrosaur fossil, the project will one day be completed.

“We’re still working to find more of this specimen,” Starnes said.