Of all of the potentially attainable achievements I could imagine for my life, finding a new dinosaur fossil seems like the coolest.
A new dog-sized dinosaur species has been discovered after a small fossil of a jawbone was found outside of Dallas.
Murray Cohen, a volunteer with the Perot Museum of Nature and Science found the 2-inch fossil within a rock formation near Lake Grapevine in 2020. He initially thought it was a small crocodile jaw, until Ron Tykoski, vice president at Perot, took a closer look under a microscope with fine pins and needles.
“Partway through the process, suddenly my head is going, ‘This doesn’t look like a crocodile. What’s wrong with this thing?’” Tykoski said. “I go, ‘let me check the front of the jaw’ and suddenly this anatomical feature, an articulation point, appeared; and that was an immediate light-bulb moment: This is not a crocodile, this is a dinosaur.”
Tykoski said no living animal today has that particular jaw feature. In fact, only similar small plant-eating dinosaurs had the feature.
The next three years were spent investigating and researching to disprove it wasn’t another already discovered dinosaur. Finally, reviewers reaffirmed their discovery and recently published it in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. The new species has been named Ampelognathus coheni, which roughly translates to “Cohen’s Grapevine jaw,” after the volunteer and city where it was found.
The small dinosaur would have been about 6 feet long with a long tail and neck. It would have weighed around 20 to 60 pounds. Tykoski said the head of this species probably could be held in a human hand because of how small it was. Some 96 million years ago, it would have been splashing around in what was the shoreline, a lot like the Gulf Coast today.
It’s not just discovering the new species of dinosaur, it’s having it named for you. No one’s going to have a story to top that. The Fort Worth Report and Texas Monthly have more.