Episode 426: The Best Dinosaur Museums in the World. The best places to see dinosaurs in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia

Find the dinosaur museum closest to you or any of the museums we mentioned at iknowdino.com/dinosaur-museums/

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The dinosaur of the day: Haya

• Neornithischian (“hypsilophodontid”) that lived in the Late Cretaceous in what is now the Gobi Desert in Mongolia (Javkhlant Formation and Nemegt Formation)
• Had a somewhat long body, long tail, short arms, walked on two legs, and had an elongate skull with a beak
• Had multiple unique features, including five “bulbous, unserrated premaxillary teeth”
• The frontals, at the top of the head “form a remarkably flat and extensive skull table”
• Had relatively wide, triangular nasals
• Had an elongate lower jaw (dentary) that “forms over half the length of the mandible”
• Had short neural arches
• Had a gracile humerus (arm), that in one specimen found “bears evidence of scavenging” (two holes probably from burrowing arthropods, as seen in other dinosaurs from the Gobi Desert)
• Described by Peter Makovicky and others in 2011
• Found several specimens that were well-preserved
• Fossils found between 2002 and 2007 by the joint Mongolian Academy of Sciences—AMNH expeditions
• Holotype is a complete, “barely distorted” skull, and has parts of the spine
• Type species is Haya griva
• Genus and species name are “from the Sanskrit for the Hindu deity Hayagriva, an avatar of Vishnu characterized by a horse head, in reference to the elongate and faintly horse-like skull of this dinosaur, and the common depiction of this deity in the Buddhist art of Mongolia”
• Name refers to the long, horse-like skull
• Lots of specimens found, so we know pretty much how the whole skeleton looked
• A few specimens were found with a lot of gastroliths
• One was described as a “sizeable gastrolith mass” and is only the second one found in ornithopods
• The specimen with the gastroliths found near the abdomen had “two tightly clustered masses of pebbles”, probably quartz or flint
• Mark Norell and Daniel Barta published in 2016 about a new Haya specimen found in the Nemegt Formation
• Fossils found around 1992, a fragmentary skeleton that included the left side of the head, parts of the arm, vertebrae, ribs
• Most of the specimen was eroded but after preparing the fossils they found it had a lot of similarities to Haya
• In 2021, Barta and Norell published in-depth the osteology of Haya griva (skeleton)
• Lots of referred specimens (counted 36 in the paper)
• Enough to see a growth series
• Specimens studied had a range of sizes but histology shows they are perinatal to subadults, and there are no skeletally mature specimens
• Based on histology, probably had a high growth rate, and all the specimens sampled seemed to have been actively growing when they died
• Got more teeth as it grew
• Gastroliths found with multiple specimens
• Gastroliths are smooth with rounded edges
• One specimen found had skull and bones “fairly widely separated from one another, possibly dispersed by scavengers or running water”
• In one case, two individuals were found buried close to each other, along with a troodontid tooth
• Lots of the bones have holes, probably from insects eating the bones after the dinosaurs died (see in lots of dinosaurs from the Gobi Desert)
• Other animals that lived around the same time and place include the neoceratopsian Yamaceratops, small maniraptorans, mammals, and lizards

Fun Fact:

Thomas Jefferson was an amateur fossil collector.

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