DALLAS — The Perot Museum of Nature and Science announced Tuesday they have discovered a new dinosaur species in North Texas.
A team of paleontologists, Ron Tykoski, Dori Contreras and Christopher Noto, identified the new species, Ampelognathus coheni -- a small, plant-eating dinosaur. The dinosaur was discovered based on a two-inch long fossil from a partial lower left jaw bone found near the sandy shores of Grapevine Lake in Grapevine. The fossil has since been added to the collections of the Perot Museum.
The museum said in a news release that the dinosaur likely measured less than 6 feet long and weighed no more than a medium-sized dog. It would have roamed North Texas about 96 million years ago.
At the time of its existence, the museum said a shallow seaway divided North America into two eastern and western landmasses, with the eastern shoreline crossing through North Texas -- giving the region a hot, humid tropical climate with beaches, lagoons, rivers, swamps, deltas, forests and barrier islands.
The name of the species was derived from the latin word for "Grapevine Jaw," Ampelognathus, and the name of the local fossil enthusiast and Perot volunteer who found the fossil, Murray Cohen.
This species, the museum said, is the first known small-bodies, plant eating ornithopod dinosaur from Texas' Lewisville Formation, and only the fourth dinosaur specimen found from the soil and rocks of the Dallas-Fort Worth area -- following the armored dinosaur Pawpawsauras, the large plant-eating Protohadros and the bird Flexomornis.
