Incredibly unusual dinosaur unearthed in Mississippi

The most complete dinosaur fossil found in Mississippi, considered incredibly unusual by state officials, remains 85 percent buried since its discovery in 2007.Paleontologists have identified the specimen as a hadrosaur, a family of duck-billed, herbivorous dinosaurs that lived over 82 million years ago. The hadrosaur family includes at least 61 identified species, with potentially hundreds more having once roamed the Earth.

Researchers have unearthed portions of the spinal vertebrae, forearm, feet, and pelvic bones of this specimen. However, extracting the rest of the fossil from its location near Booneville in northeast Mississippi has proven challenging.This thing sat for a while because we didn’t have anybody to work on it, said James Starnes, an official with the state’s geology office.For nearly two decades, the specific species of this hadrosaur fossil remained unidentified. Researchers are now using a 3D method of forensic bone analysis called geometric morphometrics to solve the mystery before the fossil is fully unearthed.