Researchers work to identify 82 million-year-old dinosaur found in Mississippi

It's the most complete dinosaur ever found in Mississippi, but exactly what it was remains a mystery.

It's been identified as a hadrosaur; a member of a family of similar dinosaurs, and it roamed what is now Northeast Mississippi about 82 million years ago. It was an herbivore measuring 25-26 feet long and when standing on its back legs was about 16 feet tall.

Its fossilized remains have been stored for years, but now a University of Southern Mississippi graduate student is working to solve the mystery.

"This thing sat for a while because we didn't have anybody to work on it," said James Starnes of the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality's Office of Geology. "They're called duck-billed dinosaurs.

"They have a very goose-like or duck-like bill. These are huge animals."

The most complete dinosaur found in Mississippi

The first pieces of the animal to be discovered were unearthed in 2007 in the Booneville area, Starnes said, and about 15% of the skeleton has been collected since.

"It's incredibly unusual," Starnes said. "We just don't have a lot of skeletons.

"We have pieces and parts, but not a skeleton. We're still getting more of this specimen out."

Some of the pieces are held privately, but some are held at the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science.

"We have quite a few of the vertebrae," said George Phillips, museum paleontology curator. "We have one humerus.

"We have one ulna. The ulna is the posterior of the forearm. We have some of the foot bones. Then we have the pubis."

What hasn't been found is the skull, which is a key to identification of different species of hadrosaurs. Different species had different crowns on their heads. What purpose they served is unknown, but each was unique and there were a lot of them.

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Which hadrosaur is it?

"There's hundreds," said USM geology graduate student Derek Hoffman. "They're the most well-represented dinosaurs in the fossil record, without a doubt. The research I'm doing is the identification of this hadrosaur."

Without the skull, the pubis, a bone from the front of the pelvis, became the next best thing. Differences between pubis bones between the species are subtle, but when compared can help identify the different species through a process known as geometric morphometrics.

"What geometric morphometrics does is it takes a shape-analysis approach," Hoffman said.

While it may not narrow the animal down to one species, it can come close and answer the question, "What is the lowest taxonomy level we can get this hadrosaur to," Hoffman said.

Do you have a story idea? Contact Brian Broom at 601-961-7225 or bbroom@gannett.com.