11 hours ago
Dinosaur the size of a Labrador discovered in US after misclassification
A new dog-sized dinosaur species, Enigmacursor, has been identified after its fossils were initially miscategorised.
Believed to have lived approximately 150 million years ago, Enigmacursor was a herbivore roughly the size of a Labrador with long legs for escaping predators.
The fossils, discovered between 2021 and 2022 in the western United States, were bought by the Natural History Museum from a commercial dealer.
Palaeontologists realised the near-complete skeleton was not a Nanosaurus, as originally labelled, leading to its reclassification as a distinct species, Enigmacursor, meaning "mysterious runner."
This discovery offers hope for correctly identifying hundreds of other small dinosaur bones previously misclassified and highlights the need to re-evaluate historical assumptions in palaeontology.
