Big-assed dinosaur
23 February, 2011 | Richard P. Grant |
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If you can’t afford to go to the badlands of Arizona to discover a new dinosaur, you could always do it from the comfort of your own home–or local museum.
Bones from two dinosaurs were recovered from a quarry in Utah in 1994, and taken to the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. This is fortunate for palaeontology because the quarry has been frequently looted, denying scientists the opportunity to examine any finds there—but allowing Mike Taylor, from University College London (just round the corner from Naturally Selected Towers), to effectively rediscover the bones and realize that they are from a previously unknown species.
Published1 in Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, the second remarkable thing about this dinosaur is the size of its gluteus maximus. Brontomerus mcintoshi, or “thunder thighs”, is named for its enormous thigh muscles (and its species name is in honour of John “Jack” McIntosh, a retired physicist at Wesleyan University and lifelong avocational paleontologist, the size of whose thighs are not reported).
In this video from UCL, Mike Taylor takes us to the Grant Museum to describe the discovery, and the importance of the dinosaur’s fundamental largeness:
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