A team of archaeologists have discovered the fossilized remains of a 72-million-year-old dinosaur tail in a desert in northern Mexico, it has been announced.
The ‘unusually well-preserved’ four-foot tail was the first ever found in Mexico, said Francisco Aguilar, director of the country’s National Institute for Anthropology and History.
The team, made up of archaeologists and students from INAH and the National Autonomous University of Mexico, identified the fossil as a hadrosaur, or duck-billed dinosaur.
The ‘unusually well-preserved’ four-foot tail was the first ever found in Mexico. It is 72 million years old.
The tail, found near the small town of General Cepeda in the border state of Coahuila, likely made up half the dinosaur’s length, Aguilar said.
Archaeologists found the 50 vertebrae of the tail completely intact after spending 20 days slowly lifting a sedimentary rock covering the creature’s bones, INAH said.
Precision: Archaeologists painstakingly excavated the tail
Speaker for the dead: The tail, from a hadrosaur, will enable experts to learn about bone conditions that affected the colossal beasts.
Despite Mexico’s rich heritage in paleontology, this is the first dinosaur tail found in the country.
Strewn around the tail were fossilized remains of a 50-vertebrae section of the dinosaur’s lengthy spine, meticulously intact after spending 20 days in the desert slowly lithifying a sedimentary rock containing the creature’s bones. Stone archeologists from INAH carefully extracted the tail fossils, including one of the dinosaur’s hips.
The newfound discovery fuels further understanding of the hadrosaur family’s familial and social dynamics that affected dinosaurs, reminiscent of those of humans, Aguilars said.
It is noted that during the Cretaceous period, which ended about 65 million years ago, much of what is now the northern region of Mexico was underwater.
This has enabled researchers to unearth remains of both marine and land-based dinosaurs.
The presence of the remains was reported to INAH by locals in June 2012. After initial inspections, excavation began earlier this month. The remains of the tail will be transferred to General Cepeda for cleaning and further investigation.
An artist rendering provided by the National Geographic Society shows what a hadrosaur is believed to have looked like. Most dinosaur groups, except hadrosaurs and ceratopsians, were in decline for the last 40 million years of the Cretaceous.