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New Species Of Canadian Horned Dinosaurs Discovered In Museum Collections


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Newly Discovered Dinosaur Fossil Had Sat In Museum

For 75 Years by Thomas Tamblyn The Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/11/26/new-dinosaur-discovery-museum_n_6224294.html

New species of dinosaur discovered lying forgotten

in a museum, PhysOrg, November 26, 2014

http://phys.org/news/2014-11-species-dinosaur-lying-forgotten-museum.html

New species of dinosaur discovered lying forgotten

in a museum, University of Bath Press Release

http://www.bath.ac.uk/research/news/2014/11/25/new-dinosaur-discovered/

Fossils reveal TWO new species of dinosaurs that roamed

North America 75 million years ago (The fossilised bones

from two dinosaurs had been stored for 75 years)

by Jonathan O'Callaghan, Mail Online, Nov. 25, 2014

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2849070/Fossils-reveal-TWO-new-species-dinosaurs-roamed-North-America-75-million-years-ago.html

BBC News - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02ct3k4

The paper is:

Longrich, N. R., 2014, The horned dinosaurs Pentaceratops

and Kosmoceratops from the upper Campanian of

Alberta and implications for dinosaur biogeography.

Cretaceous Research. vol. 51, pp. 292-308.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195667114001293

Yours,

Paul H.

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Nice!

Some of the articles mention the bones "lying forgotten in a museum" for 75 years as if that was a bad thing, but this is actually an example of a museum collection doing the job it's intended to do. Discoveries don't stop with the scientist who first collects and identifies a fossil. If the specimen and its associated collection information are properly curated, they can lead to new research decades or even centuries later.

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Also people should note that it wasn't like they just threw these fossils in a back room and forgot about them. What made it possible to interpret those old fossils as new species was the discovery of new species that helped to refine the understanding of the variability in the morphology and range of genus. It allow a re-interpretation of the fossils.

It's not like the janitor was poking around in a closet and said "Hey! Who dumped this here?" :D

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Some people may find it hard to take Longrich's paper recording Pentaceratops from Alberta, but finding a New Mexican dino in Canada is not w/o precedent b/c Parasaurolophus has been found in Alberta as well as the southwestern US, and Gryposaurus occurs from Utah northward to Alberta. In this case, the notion of separate northern and southern dino provinces in the Western Interior is somewhat blurred.

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