New blog post

Joy posted on her blog:

DINOSAURS!

I'm kind of a dinosaur geek. I could spend days in the Museum of Natural History. This was very exciting to me...

"The almost perfectly complete fossil of a young Theropod Dinosaur – including some preserved hair and skin* (see update below) – was unveiled yesterday by scientists from theBavarian paleontological and geological collections (BSPG) in Munich, Germany. BSPG conservator Oliver Rauhut described it as the best preserved dinosaur skeleton to have ever been found in Europe. Darren Naish, palaeontologist at the University of Southampton, says the fossil is “incredible”. Rauhut says that fossils of theropod dinosaurs, which include the genus Tyrannosaurus, are rare and usually fragmented. "The best-preserved Tyrannosaurus we have are about 80 percent preserved, and that is already terrific," he says. The new fossil is around 98% intact.

The dinosaur died around 135 million years ago at a site near the present town of Kelheim in the southern German state of Bavaria. Rauhut and his team of palaeontologists think it was no more than a year old.

Naish hopes that the bone preservation in the fossil is as outstanding as it looks in the publically-released photo, because this might help scientists piece together the phylogeny of theropod species. No data is available on the fossil yet, so Naish can only speculate, but he says the dinosaur seems to..." READ THE REST HERE