Posted on 03/24/2010 7:19:40 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
A plant-eating dinosaur might have been swallowed up by a collapsing sand dune some 185 million years ago in what are now Utah's red rocks. The desert disaster likely plopped the dinosaur onto its head, where it remained until being discovered by a local historian and artist in 2004... in the Comb Ridge area near Bluff, Utah, when he spotted the bony fossil protruding from the multicolored cliffs of the Navajo Sandstone, which represents the remains of a huge sand dune desert as large as the modern-day Sahara Desert. As such, the dinosaur has been named Seitaad ruessi, derived from the Navajo word "Seit'aad," a sand-desert monster from the Navajo creation legend. In 2005, museum paleontologists and crews excavated and collected the specimen, which included most bones of the skeleton, except for the head, and parts of the neck and tail. The missing parts were lost to erosion over the past thousand years, but were almost certainly visible when Native Americans lived on the cliff just above the skeleton, the researchers say... helps to fill a gap in knowledge about the animal's family of dinosaurs, whose North American fossils are sparse... Seitaad belonged to a group of plant-eating dinosaurs called sauropodomorphs... had a long tail and neck topped with a small head and was equipped with leaf-shaped teeth likely specialized for an herbivorous diet. A large curved claw on its "thumb" is a bit of a mystery, as paleontologists aren't sure what function it would have for an herbivorous beast that's not snagging meaty prey.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
Paleontologist Mark Loewen displays the newly discovered dinosaur species, Seitaad ruessi, which is derived from the Navajo word, Seit'aad, a sand-desert monster from the Navajo creation legend that swallowed its victims in sand dunes. Credit: Utah Museum of Natural History, University of Utah.
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I had visions of Frank Lautenberg on the Jersey shore.
You’re havin’ a big night!
;-)
No one would know for a year and his votes would still be recorded.
Isn’t that guy on “Lost”?
So you mean there were tress and grasses in what is now the Utah desert?
Huh, who would have though there were changes in the climate. /s/
Very interesting.
Odd how the Navajo would have such a legend when the time span is so great and there was no possible overlap between this creature and humans. Unless we're wrong about the time span.
How did all those dinosaurs die before Adam sinned?
Artists' rendition of an ATVsaurus' demise.
So that’s what happened to Hagrid.
Which one is the Dinosaur?
If he's hanging out around Bluff, Utah, he is definitely lost!
Of course it didn't "just happen!" He crossed the Mastodon Mafia; you don't mess with those guys!
I can only express how dangerous those guys are by TYPING IN ALL CAPS!
They made him "swim with the sand fleas!"
Ahb . . . the white thingey is the Seitaad Ruessi?
And the guy in blue just killed it?
Nice headline... Good chuckle on that one..
Wait, wait.... there must be more a plausible explanation here. Surely people don’t think that the earth is much older than 6000 years. Next thing you know someone will say that Geocentrism is wrong.
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