Abydosaurus mcintoshi - Dinosaur Discoveries
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Four
complete skulls have been discovered in the Dinosaur National Monument
in eastern Utah. These skulls belong to a large, herbivore sauropod, a
group of large plant eating dinosaurs, among these were Brachiosaurus.
These skulls belong to a dinosaur by the name Abydosaurus. Two of these skulls were intact. This is a rare find since sauropod skulls are built lightly. These large sauropods had very long necks, and at the end of the neck you would find these skulls. They had to be built lightly to cut down on weight.
Instead of thick bones fused together, sauropod skulls are made of thin bone walls bound by soft tissue.
These skulls usually fall apart and disintegrate. Most of sauropod finds are well known from the neck down because of this.
Researchers
believe that Brachiosaurus is a close relative to Abydosaurus, even though
Brachiosaurus lived 45 million years earlier than Abydosaurus. This belief
is supported by the skull structure and other similarities between the
two sauropods.
The fossils were excavated from the Cedar Mountain Formation in Dinosaur National Monument near the city of Vernal, Utah.
These
skulls are temporarily displayed at BYU Museum of Paleontology, in Provo,
Utah. The new dinosaur species was given the name Abydosaurus mcintoshi.
The name Abydos is a Greek name for the city along the Nile River (Araba el Madfuna) which it was the burial place of the head and neck of the Egyptian God Osiris, and since the skulls were found in a quarry overlooking the Green River, hence the given name.
Mcintoshi is an American Paleontologist, Jack Mcintosh, his name was used for his contributions to the study of sauropods.