LOS ANGELES (AP) — The newest dinosaur on display at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County is not only a new species, but also the only dinosaur with green bones ever found on Earth, museum officials say.
Named “Gnatalie” (pronounced “na-talie”) after the gnats that swarmed around it during excavation, the remains of the long-necked, herbivorous dinosaur acquired its distinctive dark mottled olive-green color from the mineral celadonite during fossilization.
Fossils are typically brown from silica or black from iron minerals, but celadonite is rare in green because it formed during volcanic and hydrothermal activity that often destroyed the bones it was buried in. Celadonite entered the fossil record about 50 to 80 million years ago when volcanic activity raised temperatures and replaced previous minerals.
The dinosaur lived 150 million years ago during the Late Jurassic period, making it older than Tyrannosaurus rex, which lived 66 to 68 million years ago.
Researchers discovered the bones in the Utah Badlands in 2007.
“Dinosaurs are a fantastic way to educate visitors about the essentials of science, and what better way to engage them in the process of scientific discovery and get them thinking about the wonder of the world we live in than a green, approximately 80-foot-long dinosaur,” Louis M. Chiappe of the museum’s Dinosaur Institute said in a statement about the team’s discovery.
“I heard rumors about a green dinosaur when I was a graduate student,” said Matt Wedel, an anatomist and paleontologist at Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, near Los Angeles.
When he caught a glimpse of the bones being cleaned, he said, “It was like nothing I’d ever seen before.”
The discovery, which is expected to be published in a scientific paper next year, is a copy of the sauropod Diplodocus, a family of large herbivores that includes brontosaurus and brachiosaurus. It will be the museum’s largest dinosaur and will be on display in the museum’s new welcome center this fall.
John Whitlock, a professor at Mount Aloysius College, a private Catholic university in Cresson, Pennsylvania, who studies sauropods, said he was excited to find such a complete skeleton, which could help fill in the gaps of specimens that are still incomplete.
“This is a tremendous achievement and furthers our ability to understand not only taxonomic diversity but also anatomical diversity,” Whitlock said.
The dinosaur was named “Gnatalie” after the museum last month chose five names in a public vote, including a derivative of “verdi,” Latin for green; “olive,” after the small green fruit that symbolizes peace, joy and strength in many cultures; “esme,” a contraction of “esmeralda,” Spanish for emerald; and “sage,” a green plant that symbolizes Los Angeles and is also grown in the Natural History Museum’s natural gardens.
