Dinosaurs, traditionally, are big and fierce. But researchers have unearthed a perfectly preserved skeleton of a baby dinosaur that’s more Disney than dangerous-looking.
The remains are of a baby horned dinosaur called a Chasmosaurine, found in Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada.
It’s a distant cousin of the more famous Triceratops (the creature that was ill on Jurassic Park)
The Chasmosaurine was found by Professor Phil Currie of the University of Alberta.
He told Everythingdinosaur.com: ‘The big ones just preserve better. They don’t get eaten, they don’t get destroyed by animals. You always hope that you’re going to find something small and that it will turn out to be a dinosaur.’
Professor Currie’s field team estimate that their baby dinosaur was about three years old when it died.
It measures over 1.5 metres in length, but would have been five metres long and heavier than an Indian elephant had it reached adulthood.
Analysis of the soil suggested that the dinosaur’s final resting place was watery – and so it had probably drowned.
Professor Currie added: ‘I think it may have just gotten trapped out of its league in terms of water current.’
