Heavy Rains Yield Big Dinosaur Fossil
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| This photo provided by Johns Hopkins Medicine, shows an undated photo of a fossil of the dinosaur. Scientists at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine say the fossil of an armored dinosaur hatchling has been found in College Park. The researchers’ findings are published in the Sept. 9 issue of the Journal of Paleontology. They describe a nodosaur that lived about 110 million years ago. The fossil was discovered in 1997 by Ray Stanford, a dinosaur tracker looked for fossils close to his home. He donated the hatchling nodosaur to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, where it is now on display to the public. (AP Photo/Johns Hopkins Medicine) |
Scientists say they have excavated Maryland’s largest dinosaur fossil find in five years, a football-sized bone weighing between two and three pounds.
Steve Jabo, a Smithsonian fossil expert, excavated the bone, but it’s too early to say what kind of dinosaur it belonged to.
The Baltimore Sun reports (http://bsun.md/ovX8Hg) the fossil was poking from the clay September 10 at Maryland’s Dinosaur Park. Amateur paleontologist David Hacker spotted it while scouring the site for fossils exposed by heavy rains from remnants of recent Tropical Storm Lee.
Jabo said the fossil could be part of a leg bone of a plant-eating sauropod.
Dinosaur Park, in Prince George’s County, has been yielding fossils for decades and scientists and amateur sleuths deliver any finds there to the Smithsonian Institution.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.
