A newly-discovered dinosaur may have spent part of its life underground

SCOTT DETROW, HOST:

Now there is a new dinosaur species on the paleontology block, Fona herzogae.

HAVIV AVRAHAMI: Small plant-eating dinosaurs - they were bipedal. If you took, like, a Komodo dragon tail and attached it to the back of an ostrich, that's kind of what Fona would have looked like.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

That's Haviv Avrahami. He's a Ph.D. student at North Carolina State University and was part of the team that identified this new dino. They published their research in the scientific journal The Anatomical Record this month.

AVRAHAMI: It was a small dinosaur. It was about 7 feet long, so probably would have been as long as Shaq would have been if he was laying down.

DETROW: A Shaq-sized dinosaur, still smaller than the rest, and that's a big deal.

AVRAHAMI: Because bigger dinosaurs preserve better. You know, if you can imagine, like, taking a chicken bone out to your garden and leaving it in the soil, and then also taking a cow leg and leaving it there too, you come back three months later, and it's more likely that you won't find that chicken bone, but you might still find that cow femur.

SHAPIRO: Avrahami and his team believe this new dino was a burrowing species, spending at least part of its life underground. He says paleontologists just don't know a lot about small plant-eating dinosaurs like this one.

AVRAHAMI: Their family tree is basically like a giant black hole in paleontology knowledge.

DETROW: This is the 32-year-old's first-ever dinosaur discovery. And as part of the team that identified her, he also got to name her. And he used the opportunity to honor his mother, who's from Guam.

AVRAHAMI: The name Fo'na comes from our ancestral creation mythology, which is about a brother and a sister spirit. Fo'na is the sister, and Pontan is the brother. When Pontan dies, Fo'na uses the parts of his body to craft the pieces of the universe and the pieces of the island. At the end of this, she dies herself and becomes fossilized, and from her petrified body springs forth the Chamorro people.

And I thought this story was so cool because it closely mirrors the life of Fona the dinosaur, because Fona was found in a burrow, so it had close familial bonds and also was preserved within the earth.

SHAPIRO: So Avrahami hopes that from his team's discovery springs more knowledge about this small burrowing dinosaur and the life that it led millions of years ago.

DETROW: If you're in the area, you can see Fona herzogae for yourself at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

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