My dinosaur geekery finally warranted its own category.
The Barosaurus skeleton discovery was made this year, not during a field dig but in the halls of the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada as Associate Curator of vertebrate paleontology David Evans dug through collections of isolated bones once assumed to belong to as many different dinosaurs.
The Jurassic Period dinosaur weighed about 33,000 pounds (15,000 kilograms) and belongs to the four-legged, plant-eating group of dinosaurs known as sauropods, some of which sport long necks and tails, like this new specimen. The largest sauropods reached nearly 100 feet (30 meters) in length and tipped the scales at more than 50 tons (50,000 kilograms).
Evans was tasked with finding a sauropod dinosaur to display in a forthcoming exhibition at the museum. After months of researching dead ends, Evans hit the treasure-hunt jackpot. He spotted a reference in an article by famed sauropod expert Jack McIntosh suggesting that a Barosaurus skeleton was stored at the ROM.
The ROM’s databases turned up squat. Evans finally connected disparate dinosaur dots, realizing that what were thought to be isolated bones scattered throughout the collections room actually belonged to a single dinosaur—a Barosaurus.
(via yahoo news)
