New Species of Dinosaur Identified

A new species of dinosaur has been identified from a partial skeleton discovered in the Eastend area almost 40 years ago.

Thescelosaurus Assiniboensis is a late-era plant eating dinosaur whose specimen was collected from the Frenchman River Valley near Eastend in 1968.

The 65-million-year-old specimen was studied and identified by Caleb M. Brown, a Ph. D. student with the University of Toronto, as part of a Masters thesis while studying at the University of Calgary.

He says this species is one of a number of smaller dinosaurs that we are just learning about: "We have found most of the large stuff, the things like Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops we've known for a long time, but this particular type of dinosaur is quite small, only two metres long. What we are finding out is that we actually know a lot less about these small animals, and are actually just now starting to fill in the diversity of a lot of these small things, and they are probably much more diverse and abundant than we originally thought."

 

You can see the partial skeleton at the T. Rex Discovery Centre in Eastend, and a full cast is on display at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Regina.

 

Shawn Mullin talked with Caleb M. Brown about the studies on the dinosaur: