''' A preserved < hatching line > confirms it must’ve died shortly after emerging from its egg... Truly a baby dinosaur, but big news for palaeontology ! '''
A new study has become the first-ever to definitively identify an ankylosaur hatchling. The specimen is around 115 million years old and belongs to the species Liaoningosaurus paradoxus, for which we’d previously only found juveniles. We’ve still yet to find a Liaoningosaurus adult !
It is not clear yet,” said study author Dr. Wenjie Zheng of the Zhejiang Museum of Natural History to IFLScience. “I suspect one possibility is that the juvenile individuals lived near water.”
Liaoningosaurus was a very different beast. It was pretty mini as ankylosaurs go. In fact, it was suspected to be the smallest of the ornithischia – an extinct clade of “bird-hipped” herbivores.
That assumption was built upon the fact that all the specimens we’ve found to date have been very small, although it wasn't entirely clear if they were tiny adults or developing juveniles...
