The Angels – Latest dinosaur which is being set up at the Natural History Museum of The Angels Not only is it a member of a new species, but it is also the only one found on the planet whose bones are green, according to museum officials.
Named “Gnatalie” (pronounced Natalie) after the mosquitoes that swarmed during the excavation, the long-necked and long-tailed herbivorous dinosaur fossils gained their unique coloration, a mottled dark olive green, from the mineral celadonite during the fossilization process.
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 got into fossils when volcanic activity between 50 and 80 million years ago heated it enough to replace an earlier mineral.
The dinosaur lived 150 million years ago in the late Jurassic period, making it older than Tyrannosaurus rex, which lived between 66 and 68 million years ago.
Researchers discovered the bones in 2007 in the Badlands of Utah.
“Dinosaurs are a great medium to teach our visitors about the nature of science, and what better than a green dinosaur, nearly 80 feet long, to engage them in the process of scientific discovery and make them reflect on the wonders of the world we live in.”“We are very excited to announce that the dinosaurs have been discovered by the museum’s Dinosaur Institute,” said Luis M. Chiappe of the museum’s Dinosaur Institute 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 about a green dinosaur when I was in graduate school.”
When he glimpsed the bones while they were still being cleaned, he said that “They were unlike anything I have ever seen in my life”.
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, a reference to a family of huge herbivores that includes Brontosaurus and Brachiosaurus, will be the museum’s largest dinosaur and will be on display this fall in its new welcome center.