Back in 2020, while most of us were trying to set up a home office and learning how to bake bread, scientists in North Texas recovered what they thought was a fossil of a jawbone that belonged to a small crocodile.
Soon though, they discovered they were wrong.
Ron Tykoski, vice president of science at the Perot Museum, told the Dallas Morning News, "It wasn't until we got it back to the lab and got under a microscope and cleaned it up using little pins and needles that we realized it was not like a little crocodile, but instead it was a new little kind of dinosaur."
Yes! Not only a dinosaur, but scientists discovered a new species of dinosaur, right here in North Texas!
After three years of study, the scientists decided to name the dinosaur after the volunteer who found it, Murray Cohen, and the location of its discovery, at a rock formation near Lake Grapevine.
This new dinosaur will now forever be known as Ampelognathus coheni, which roughly translates to "Cohen's Grapevine jaw."
Ampelognathus coheni would have been about six-feet long and weigh somewhere around 20 to 60 pounds.
Scientists hope this recent discovery leads to the growth of future fossil exploration in North Texas. Tykoski said, "[This fossil] is actually starting to give us the best picture, the best snapshot of life, in eastern North America, east of the Seaway of this age.
"We predicted there should be plant-eating dinosaurs and animals living here. We just can't find them."
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