Episode 230 is all about Jeholosaurus, a cute little ornithopod from northeastern China.

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In this episode, we discuss:

News:

• Amazing skin detail was preserved in one inch long theropod tracks in South Korea source
• A new study shows that Dinosaurs didn’t evolve thick eggs until the Middle or Late Jurassic source
• A new paper declares that Bienosaurus is a nomen dubium source
• The Field Museum in Chicago recreated the night sky of the Cretaceous period to accompany Sue source
• The University of Michigan Museum of Natural History is a new museum that has a Majungasaurus on display source
• In Texas, there’s a traveling museum that has gone to thousands of schools, called Dinosaur George source
• Robert Young, a 9-year-old created a website Dinology, dedicated to dinosaurs source
• The Jurassic Park trilogy is now on Netflix, in the UK and Ireland, but not the US source

The dinosaur of the day: Jeholosaurus

• Ornithischian that lived in the Early Cretaceous in what is now China (Yixian Formation in the Jehol Biota)
• Body similar to other ornithopods
• Bipedal and small
• Holotype is of a compressed skull and partial skeleton, and is 28 in (71.1 cm) long, with a 14 in (35.6 cm) long tail
• Second specimen found, has small skull and some neck vertebrae
• Both specimens are either juveniles or subadults
• Skulls are incomplete, but had a short snout and large eyes
• May have been an omnivore
• Back teeth and maxillary teeth are fan shaped, like herbivores
• Premaxillary teeth are longer and more narrow, like carnivores
• Found in 2000 in Liaoning Province and described in 2000 by Xu Xing, Wang Xioalin, and You Hailu
• Type species is Jeholosaurus shangyuanensis
• Name means “lizard from Jehol” (an old geographical name for western Liaoning and northern Hebei)
• Species name refers to the geographical area of Shangyuan where the fossils were found
• Small ornithopods are rare in East Asia. More work needs to be done to further establish the phylogeny of Jeholosaurus

Fun Fact: The term Konservat-Lagerstätte is used for amazing paleontological sites that capture more detail than a typical site.