VERY INTERESTING: ALBERTADROMEUS

 Hello this is Dino Lou and today we are talking about 

ALBERTADROMEUS


Albertadromeus is the smallest herbivore dinosaur ever to have lived! Being only 5 feet long and about 1.6 meters tall. It weighed only 16 pounds! About the size of a large dog! Now imagine walking that in a leash! It was discovered in 2009 by study co-author Dr. David Evans and now displayed in Cleveland Museum of Natural History. 


This cute little dinosaur lived in what we call southern Alberta in the Late Cretaceous, about 83.6 to 72.1 million years ago its fossils have been found in Saskatchewan (Canada). So, this little one would have had to hide from Trex! 


Albertadromeus is a cursorial ornithopod.  Which means ground-dwelling and ornithopods are those dinosaurs that are believed to have started as small dinosaurs but over time, they grew in both size as well as number to eventually become one of the most successful herbivore dinosaur groups around!


The Albertadromeus fossils that have been dug up show something interesting. The lower leg bones – the fibula and the tibia had their distal ends fused together. This is what inspired the palaeontologist's to come up with the type species syntarsus.


A Syntarsus had four-toed feet with fused ankle bones (these ankle bones were like those of early ornithopods although it was an early saurischian dinosaur - these ankle bones were what Syntarsus was named for).

And now the word Syntarsus is not only the name of one dinosaur but a type of dinosaur!

This has been Dino Lou thank you for reading

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