A 100-million-year-old dinosaur has been unearthed.A newly found ancestor of Thescelosaurus reveals proof that these animals spent not less than a part of their time in underground burrows.The brand new dinosaur, Fona [/Foat’NAH/] herzogae lived 99 million years in the past in what’s now Utah. At the moment, the world was a big floodplain ecosystem sandwiched between the shores of a large inland ocean to the east and energetic volcanoes and mountains to the west. It was a heat, moist, muddy surroundings with quite a few rivers working by means of it.Paleontologists from North Carolina State College and the North Carolina Museum of Pure Sciences unearthed the fossil – and different specimens from the identical species – within the Mussentuchit Member of the Cedar Mountain Formation, starting in 2013.The North Carolina Museum of Pure Sciences informed WRAL Information it has the actual skeleton, a 3D-printed mannequin of the cranium, in addition to a scientific illustration of what it will seem like fleshed out.Fona was a small-bodied, plant-eating dinosaur in regards to the measurement of a giant canine with a easy physique plan. It lacks the bells and whistles that characterize its extremely ornamented family corresponding to horned dinosaurs, armored dinosaurs, and crested dinosaurs. However that doesn’t imply Fona was boring.The genus title Fona comes from the ancestral creation story of the Chamorro individuals, who’re the indigenous populations of Guam and the Pacific Mariana Islands. Fona and Pontan have been brother and sister explorers who found the island and have become the land and sky. The species title honors Lisa Herzog, the paleontology operations supervisor on the North Carolina Museum of Pure Sciences, for her invaluable contributions and dedication to the sphere of paleontology.”I needed to honor the indigenous mythology of Guam, which is the place my Chamorro ancestors are from,” stated Haviv Avrahami, Ph.D. scholar at N.C. State and digital technician for the brand new Dueling Dinosaurs program on the North Carolina Museum of Pure Sciences. “Within the fantasy, Fona grew to become a part of the land when she died, and from her physique sprung forth new life, which to me, ties into fossilization, magnificence, and creation. Fona was almost certainly lined in a downy coat of colourful feathers. The species title is for Lisa Herzog, who has been integral to all this work and found probably the most distinctive Fona specimens of a number of people preserved collectively in what was seemingly a burrow.”The researchers imagine Fona is vital to increasing our understanding of Cretaceous ecosystems.”Fona offers us perception into the third dimension an animal can occupy by shifting underground,” Avrahami stated. “It provides to the richness of the fossil document and expands the recognized variety of small-bodied herbivores, which stay poorly understood regardless of being extremely integral elements of Cretaceous ecosystems.”