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The latest dinosaur to be mounted at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles isn’t just a member of a new species — it’s also the only one on the planet whose bones are green, according to officials at the museum
Named “Gnatalie” (pronounced Natalie) for the mosquitoes that swarmed during excavation, the long-necked and long-tailed herbivorous dinosaur fossils acquired their unique coloration, a dark olive green, from the mineral celadonite during the process of fossilization.
While fossils are typically brown from silica or black from iron minerals, green is rare because celadonite forms under volcanic or hydrothermal conditions that typically destroy buried bones. Celadonite entered the fossil record when volcanic activity about 50 million to 80 million years ago made it hot enough to replace an earlier mineral.
The dinosaur lived 150 million years ago at the end of the Jurassic Era, making it older than Tyrannosaurus rex – which lived 66 to 68 million years ago.
Researchers discovered the bones in 2007 in the Utah Badlands.
“Dinosaurs are a great vehicle for teaching our visitors about the nature of science, and what better way than a green dinosaur, almost 80 feet long, to engage them in the process of scientific discovery and make them think about the wonders of the world we live in!” Luis M. Chiappe of the museum’s Dinosaur Institute said in a statement about his team’s discovery.
Matt Wedel, an anatomist and paleontologist at Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona near Los Angeles, said he heard “rumors of a green dinosaur when I was in graduate school.”
When he saw the bones while they were still clean, he said “it wasn’t like anything else I’d ever seen.”
The dinosaur is similar to a species of sauropod called Diplodocus, and the discovery will be published in a scientific paper next year. The sauropod, referring to a family of massive herbivores that includes the Brontosaurus and Brachiosaurus, will be the largest dinosaur in the museum and can be seen this fall in its new reception center.
John Whitlock, who teaches at Mount Aloysius College, a private Catholic college in Cresson, Pennsylvania, and researches sauropods, said it was exciting to have such a complete skeleton to help fill in the gaps for specimens that are less complete. .
“It’s tremendously huge, it really adds to our ability to understand taxonomic diversity … but also anatomical diversity,” Whitlock said.
The dinosaur was named “Gnatalie” last month after the museum asked for a public vote on five choices that included Verdi, a derivative of the Latin word for green; Olive, after the small green fruit that symbolizes peace, joy and strength in many cultures; Esme, short for Esmeralda, which is Spanish for Emerald; and Sage, a green and iconic LA plant also grown in the Natural History Museum’s Natural Gardens.
This story was reported by The Associated Press.
