SCIENTISTS HAVE discovered fossilised bones near Utah’s iconic Arches National Park representing a new species of raptor dinosaur that was about the size of a coyote, the state’s top palaeontologist announced on Friday. The raptor was among several discovered at or near Doelling’s Bowl Bone Bed, about 230 miles southeast of Salt Lake City, which has yielded several new species in the last two decades and is thought to be the base of Utah’s Cretaceous record. Fossils found at the bone bed are estimated at between 120 and 130 million years old.
The new creature, a predator, has been designated as a new dinosaur genus and species known as Yurgovuchia doellingi, said Jim Kirkland, state palaeontologist for Utah’s Geological Survey. Yurgovuchia is the first new species unearthed in Doelling’s Bowl to be named, although Kirkland said scientists believe as many as six new species may have been found at the site he described as “richer than any other place in the US.” “All we are finding are new species,” he said. “I think there are places where what we are seeing (is) evolving populations.”
The new raptor is believed to be an ancestral relative of the younger and much larger Utah raptor, based on similarities in pieces of fossilised vertebrae recovered.
In both species, the bundles of rods that jut out from the vertebrae to form the raptor’s tail are shortened, Kirkland said. The new dinosaur’s name was based on the Ute Indian word for coyote, “yurgovuch,” and for the location where it was found, itself named after Utah palaeontologist Helmut Doelling.