New Dinosaur Discovered in Utah’s Red Rocks

March 24th, 2010

ALIVE…just kidding .

Utah’s Red Rocks are a national attraction of state and national parks, and monuments. Recently, a new species of plant-eating dinosaur was discovered among them. The plant-eating dinosaur lived 185 million years ago and may have been buried alive by a collapsing sand dune where the skeleton was found.

Get ready for science names you can’t pronounce…by the time you get done pronouncing these you may have found a natural cholesterol treatment.

The new dinosaur species is named Seitaad ruessi (SAY-eet-AWD ROO-ess-EYE), which is derived from the Navajo word, “Seit’aad,” a sand-desert monster from the Navajo (Diné) creation legend that swallowed its victims in sand dunes (the skeleton of Seitaad had been “swallowed” in a fossilized sand dune when it was discovered); and Ruess, after the artist, poet, naturalist and explorer Everett Ruess who mysteriously disappeared in the red rock country of southern Utah in 1934 at age 20.

Seitaad ruessi is part of a group of dinosaurs known as sauropodomorphs. Sauropodomorphs were distributed across the globe during the Early Jurassic, when all of the continents were still together in the supercontinent named Pangaea. Millions of years later, sauropodomorphs evolved into gigantic sauropods, long-necked plant eaters whose fossils are well known from elsewhere in Utah, including Dinosaur National Monument.