Fossil of dinosaur hatchling found in College Park; nodosaurs rarely found in US

A nodosaur in the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology

From The Washington Post, Post Local: Fossil of dinosaur hatchling found in College Park; nodosaurs rarely found in US

BALTIMORE — 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.

Nodosauridae is a family of ankylosaurian dinosaurs, from the Late Jurassic to the Late Cretaceous Period of what are now North America, Asia, Antarctica and Europe.

Diagnostic characteristics for the Nodosauridae include the following: supraorbital boss rounded protuberance, occipital condyle derived from only the basioccipital and ornamentation present on the premaxilla. There is a fourth ambiguous character: the acromion is a knob-like process. All nodosaurids, like other ankylosaurs, may be described as medium-sized to large, heavily built quadrupedal herbivorous dinosaurs, possessing small denticulate teeth and parasagittal rows of osteoderms (a type of armour) on the dorsolateral surfaces of the body.