NM paleontologist on team researching new dinosaur species

More than 90 million years ago, a creature with a long neck and two claw-baring fingers roamed the Earth, grabbing plants and sinking its sharp, small leaf-shaped teeth into the greenery hanging from trees.

This new species of dinosaur was found in 2012 by an international research team that included New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science Executive Director Anthony Fiorillo. The scientists published a research paper on the Duonychus tsogtbaatari this week in the scientific journal iScience.

“This work not only opens up new possibilities for research on a little-understood family of dinosaurs,” Fiorillo said in a news release, “but it also showcases how international partnerships play a key role in our museum’s research.”

The discovery started in southern Mongolia when a construction crew noticed something strange while putting down water pipelines. When they realized what was beneath the ground wasn’t rock, but large bones, the crew called authorities at the Institute of Paleontology at the Mongolian Academy of Sciences in Ulaanbaatar — the capitol of Mongolia.

The claw of the dinosaur was fully intact and completely fossilized, something that does not commonly occur, Fiorillo said in an interview. The discovery also suggests that dinosaurs seemed to generally evolve toward a reduction of digits.

“The fact that we have a left and right hand when we recognized that there were only two fingers on each hand, that’s when the light bulb went on, it’s like, wow, this is not supposed to be the case,” Fiorillo said. “That’s what started us to get really excited by what we had.”

The newly discovered dinosaur is believed to have been a herbivore or omnivore and part of a group of theropod dinosaurs that lived in central and eastern Asia and western North America, including New Mexico.

“In New Mexico, there are remains of this group of dinosaurs,” Fiorillo said. “Not specifically duonychus, but therizinosaurus in general have been found here. This dinosaur does actually shed some light on dinosaurs within our own state.”

Fiorillo was selected to be part of the research team by his former student — Yoshitsugu Kobayashi — who Fiorillo collaborated with to release the research paper titled “Didactyl therizinosaur with a preserved keratinous claw from the Late Cretaceous of Mongolia,” after unveiling the new dinosaur species.

“Now that we have this paper, we have to figure out what we want to do next,” he said. “We have to decide if we want to investigate this rock unit further and see if we can find other examples of this animal. We also need to get this knowledge out to the public and frame it in the context of what it means for New Mexico.”