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

A new dinosaur discovery just hit the paleontology block — and this one was a burrower.

Found in Utah by North Carolina State University researchers and paleontologists, the Fona herzogae was a small-framed, plant-eating dinosaur that lived in the Cenomanian age — about 100-66 million years ago.

“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,” researcher Haviv Avrahami told NPR.

Avrahami is 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.

Instead of thinking of how big Fona was, Avrahami says it might make more sense to think of how long she was.

“It was a small dinosaur. It was about seven feet long, so probably would have been as long as Shaq would have been if he was laying down,” Avrahami said.

Avrahami and his team also believe this new dino was a burrowing species, spending at least part of its life underground.

He said paleontologists know little about small, plant-eating dinosaurs like Fona. Which is why she’s so important to figuring out how underground dinosaurs lived, ate and socialized.

“Their family tree is, basically, like a giant black hole in paleontology knowledge,” Avrahami said.

The researcher also had a hand in naming Fona the dinosaur. He said while many dinosaur species are named after Anglo-Saxon conventions, Fona is named after Avrahami’s mother’s birthplace: Guam.

“The name Fona comes from our ancestral creation mythology, which is about a brother and a sister spirit," Avrahami said.

"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.”

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.

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