U. scientists say species discovery puts Mexico on the dinosaur map

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Mexico has been terra incognita for dinosaurs for years, but that is rapidly changing after a multinational team led by University of Utah scientists extracted a skeleton from a quarry outside Saltillo and assembled a skull of striking singularity - a hatchet-faced, duck-billed specimen whose elongated nasal passages could have emitted a Cretaceous love song.

On Tuesday, U. paleontologists joined their Mexican partners at the Utah Museum of Natural History to unveil what is billed as the first named dinosaur species found in Mexico. More new species are expected to emerge from a veritable boneyard in what was once part of a humid estuary where dinosaurs are believed to have been killed by the hundreds in devastating storms and washed into a shallow bay, said Terry "Bucky" Gates, the museum's paleontology research curator.

The research team, which included Museo del Desierto in Saltillo and the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta, Canada, dubbed the new speciesVelafrons coahuilensis in the December edition of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Velafrons, which means "sailed forehead," is a relative of duck-billed dinosaurs called hadrosaurs.

Scientists were struck by the creature's unique crest, believing it exemplifies a radical evolutionary departure in the geometry of dinosaur heads. The nose bone moved to the top of the head, extending the nasal passage up the face and emerging above the eyes.

"It's totally odd and freakish," said Gates, who suspects the crest had something to do with attracting mates. "Their nasal passages probably allowed them to make notes. It's likely they were trumpeters."

The 72-million-year-old specimen is a 25-foot juvenile, leading researchers to conclude that an adult velafrons would reach 35 feet, about as big as the notorious Tyrannosaurus rex. It was recovered from a formation that dated to the middle of the 15-million-year Late Cretaceous period, the final era in the 160-million-year reign of dinosaurs.

Paleontologist Martha Carolina Aguillon made the initial discovery in 1995 in the quarries 27 miles west of Saltillo in north-central Mexico. On the day of her serendipitous find, she was picking up trash left by schoolchildren when she noticed four tail vertebras sticking from the ground.

In 2002, Mike Getty, the museum's paleontology collections manager, brought volunteers from Utah to complete the excavation. Much of the skeleton, which turned out to be 75 percent complete, was under 12 feet of hard rock.

"Luckily we had a jack hammer and lots of graduate students," Gates said. The skull came out like a disassembled jigsaw puzzle and was shipped to the Utah Museum of Natural History, where volunteer Jerry Golden spent two years liberating the skull fragments.

"This is one of our dreams come true," said Rosario Gomez Nunez, director of Mexico's Coodinacion de Paleontoogia. "It's going to bring more tourism and more support for our research."

The discovery helps reveal what Mexico was like in the Late Cretaceous period, the scientists said. While this era is the best-understood dinosaur age, Mesoamerica has remained a mystery because much of this region was covered by a shallow sea and land-roaming dinosaurs were largely confined to a narrow peninsular slice of western America known as Laramidia.

"Now that we've cracked open this amazing window into the world of dinosaurs, we look forward to future expeditions that will undoubtedly reveal more of Mexico's ancient past," Gates' U. colleague Scott Sampson said.

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* BRIAN MAFFLY can be contacted at bmaffly@sltrib.com or 801-257-8605.