Dinosaur hatchling fossil in Maryland


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WASHINGTON ? An armored dinosaur hatchling fossil found 14 years ago in College Park, Md., is the youngest of its kind ever discovered, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine researchers revealed in the latest issue of the Journal of Paleontology.

Amateur dinosaur tracker Ray Stanford discovered the fossilized remnants of a newborn nodosaur in a creek bed following a large flood in 1997. Nodosaurs rarely are found in the U.S., and Stanford's discovery is the first of a new genus and species ? Propanoplosaurus marylandicus ? that lived in the Early Cretaceous Era about 110 million years ago.

After identifying his find as a nodosaur, Stanford called David Weishampel, Ph.D, a paleontologist, expert in dinosaur systematics and professor of anatomy at Hopkins. He and his fellow researchers confirmed the fossil to be a nodosaur from the pattern of bumps and grooves on the skull, but it had a shorter snout than other nodosaurs.

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