They Found a NEW Dinosaur Species…Check It Out

Researchers in Greenland have identified a brand new species of dinosaurs from extremely well-preserved skulls uncovered beneath the icy island nation. The pre-sauropod is a two-legged herbivorous dinosaur that researchers believe represents the first truly “distinct Greenlandic dinosaur species.” Both of the skulls in question were unearthed almost thirty years ago in 1994, but at that time they were misidentified as belonging to a Plateosaurus, a Triassic period long-necked dinosaur commonly found in European digs. Two and a half decades later researchers say that the skulls are distinct from their Germanic, French, and Swiss cousins to the extent that they constitute a whole new species. The two almost complete and articulated skulls represent a middle-stage juvenile and a late-stage juvenile or subadult. They’ve given it a pretty awesome name too: Issi saaneq or in English “Cold Bone”.

“It is exciting to discover a close relative of the well-known Plateosaurus, hundreds of which have already been found here in Germany,” co-author Oliver Wings from Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, said in a press release. They explained,

“The two-legged dinosaur Issi saaneq lived about 214 million years ago in what is now Greenland. It was a medium-sized, long-necked herbivore and a predecessor of the sauropods, the largest land animals ever to live. It was discovered by an international team of researchers from Portugal, Denmark and Germany, including the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU). The name of the new dinosaur pays tribute to Greenland’s Inuit language and means “cold bone”. The team reports on its discovery in the journal Diversity.”

The “Cold Bone” Species Lived On A Very Different Earth

Issi saaneq lived approximately 214 million years ago during the late Triassic period. During this time the supercontinent of Pangea was breaking apart and what would become the mighty Atlantic ocean was just an inland sea.

 “At the time, the Earth was experiencing climate changes that enabled the first plant-eating dinosaurs to reach Europe and beyond,” explains Professor Lars Clemmensen from the University of Copenhagen.

According to Futurity.org, it took about 15 million years for herbivores to reach Greenland, saying a snail could’ve crawled there faster. Lars Clemmensen, professor in the geosciences and natural resource management department at the University of Copenhagen explained that the barrier for these dinosaurs to reach Greenland was likely climate-based. “We are able to see that during the period leading up to the dinosaurs’ migration, there was ten times as much CO2 in the atmosphere than there is today. This made it difficult for them to disperse from their original habitat in the southern hemisphere, as higher levels of CO2 produce more extreme climatic conditions,”

“Climate model experiments by Kutzbach (1994) suggest that the normal (‘control’) climate of the Jameson Land Basin region in the Late Triassic was relatively dry with precipitation being less than 2 mm=day (700 mm=yr) and fairly evenly spread over the year. Temperatures varied between ca. 10ºC in the winters and ca. 45ºC in the summers. The soil moisture was low during the hot summer months, but reached 40 mm in the winter (Kutzbach, 1994). According to this model results the basin was lying outside monsoonal influence at the margin of the dry interior of Laurasia”

“The desert areas they needed to traverse were excruciatingly hot and dry and the humid equatorial areas were tremendously unstable and wet. As such, the climate was most likely a barrier that delayed the dinosaurs’ northbound dispersion,” Clemmensen says. The environment of Greenland was vastly different then as well with a study from Dr. Clemmensen describing a relatively dry land dotted with lakes not the frozen Arctic glaciers we know today. This was the world of Cold Bone.