Thescelosaurus Pronunciation

Fun Facts

• ✓The famous 'Willo' specimen found in South Dakota in 1993 caused a global sensation in 2000 when researchers from North Carolina State University claimed a reddish mass inside its chest cavity was a fossilized heart, but later studies in 2011 showed it was most likely a concretion of iron-rich sediment, not cardiac tissue.
• ✓Thescelosaurus survived right up to the very end of the Cretaceous period, meaning this dinosaur was almost certainly alive on the day the Chicxulub asteroid struck Earth 66 million years ago, making it one of the last non-bird dinosaurs to ever walk the planet.
• ✓The type species name, T. neglectus, literally means 'neglected' because the original bones sat in storage at the Smithsonian Institution for years after being collected before paleontologist Charles W. Gilmore finally got around to officially describing and naming them in 1913.
• ✓Thescelosaurus had small bony bumps embedded in its skin called osteoderms, which is unusual for a plant-eating ornithopod and suggests it may have had some form of passive armor or display structures running along its back.
• ✓A nearly complete Thescelosaurus skeleton discovered in Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1926 remains one of the most complete ornithopod skeletons ever found from the Late Cretaceous of North America, and it has helped scientists understand the full body plan of this dinosaur better than almost any comparable species from its time.