Description
Origin : Wyoming (U.S.A.) - Hell Creek Formation
Geological era : Late Cretaceous (Maastrichtian)
Age : 70 million of years
Size : mm 5
Fossil Tooth Dinosaur Thescelosaur mm 5 Bipedal Ornithopod Thescelosaurus neglectus Extinct Reptiles Mesozoic Cretaceous Collecting Paleontology Museum.
Really nice fossil find of high museum quality, with clear details of the dental grooves and an excellent color of the enamel. No restoration at all. Only a piece, as in photos.
Thescelosaurus (Ornitopoda, Thescelosauridae) was a herbivorous dinosaur lived in the Upper Cretaceous (late Maastrichtian, about 65.5 million years ago) in North America. This dinosaur, despite being one of the last to appear, it is also unusually primitive.
Medium size (about 3.5 meters long), is known by some partial skeletons that allow us to reconstruct an animal from the powerful hind legs, and a small head with its beak, front legs with "hands" five fingers and perhaps a kind reinforcement consists of tubercles along the back seats.
Discovered for the first time in 1890 by the famous paleontologist John Bell Hatcher in layers of the Lance Formation in Wyoming, the bones of T. were gathering dust in warehouses until a museum in 1913, Charles W. Gilmore of the Smithsonian Institution decided to prepare the skeleton and to describe it. The name chosen by Gilmore, Thescelosaurus neglectus, means "beautiful lizard forgotten" due to the surprise of the paleontologist in the face to all the well-preserved remains of how long "forgotten". The skeleton was articulated, missing only the head and neck, and Gilmore saw to describe in a detailed monograph a few years later.
Other similar remains were discovered by the end of '800 to the present day, and even assign them to different interpretations of different species, to date, is recognized only one species of T., T. neglectus.
Often T. was considered a close relative of Hypsilophodon and other small ornithopods (Ipsilofodontidae family), but the lack of adequate studies on this family of dinosaurs does not allow a clear classification. Because of some unusual features of the skull (premascellar teeth) and the hind legs (the presence of four fingers fully developed and, especially, the fact that the femur is longer than the tibia, in contrast to ipsilofodontidae riders and animals in general), the T. is considered to belong to a family apart, Tescelosauridae, not closely connected with other lines of ornithopods and perhaps even the most primitive Ipsilofodontidae.
Recently, a skeleton known as "Will" has been described as the possessor of a heart with four chambers (Fisher et al., 2000, Russell et al., 2001). Included in the chest, in fact, there is a large concretion which, analyzed, revealed what appear to both ventricles and aorta, and this fact suggests that the T. had a heart has four chambers. The interpretation, if correct, would indicate that this animal had high blood pressure, a possible sign of endothermy. "Will" may also contain other internal organs. The fact that the crocodiles that birds (or the closest relatives of dinosaurs) possess a heart with four chambers, would indicate that even rulers of the Mesozoic era may have possessed a similar structure.
The T. appears to have been primarily herbivorous, although its beak and sharp front teeth might allow him to feed on small animals. The T. maybe they could move on all fours, given the length and breadth of the front legs of the "hands", but this assumption is very uncertain. Great thin bony plates were found on the sides of the ribs, but have a previously unknown function. Completely useless for defense (about three millimeters thick) are perhaps to be linked with the "uncinate process" in the possession of birds and many reptiles today.
The T. may have been an animal sexually dimorphic: the sample erroneously described as T. edmontonensis is much more robust than others, and this could be explained by the sharp distinction between body size of males and females. The remains of T. were found in a vast area stretching from New Mexico to Alaska. Among the contemporaries of this dinosaur unusually common, though not very famous, there were no real "stars" such as Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops, Ankylosaurus and Edmontosaurus, whose findings are all on our website.
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