LOS ANGELES — The newest dinosaur on display at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles is not only a new species, but also the only one in the world whose bones are green, museum officials said.
The fossils of this long-necked, long-tailed, herbivorous dinosaur, which swarmed during the excavations, got their unique color, a dark mottled olive green, from the mineral celadonite during the fossilization process. They were named after the mosquitoes that were attracted to them during the excavations.
While fossils are typically brown from silica or black from iron minerals, green is rare because celadonite forms in volcanic or hydrothermal conditions that typically destroy buried bones. The celadonite entered the fossil record when volcanic activity about 50 million to 80 million years ago made it hot enough to displace an earlier mineral.
The dinosaur lived 150 million years ago, in the late Jurassic period. This makes it older than the Tyrannosaurus rex, which lived 66 to 68 million years ago.
Researchers discovered the bones in 2007 in the Badlands of Utah.
“Dinosaurs are a wonderful tool to teach our visitors about the nature of science, and what better way than an 80-foot-long green dinosaur to engage them in the process of scientific discovery and make them reflect on the wonders of the world we live in!” Luis M. Chiappe of the museum’s Dinosaur Institute said in a statement about his team’s discovery.
Matt Wedel, an anatomist and paleontologist at Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, near Los Angeles, said he “heard rumors of a green dinosaur when I was in college.”
When he saw the bones while they were still being cleaned, he said they were “nothing like I’ve ever seen before.”
The dinosaur resembles a sauropod species called Diplodocus, and the discovery will be published in a scientific paper next year. The sauropod, which refers to a family of giant herbivores that also includes Brontosaurus and Brachiosaurus, will be the largest dinosaur in the museum and can be seen in the new Welcome Center this fall.
John Whitlock, who teaches at Mount Aloysius College, a private Catholic college in Cresson, Pennsylvania, and researches sauropods, said it was exciting to have such a complete skeleton because it could fill in the gaps left by specimens that were less complete.
“It’s huge, it really adds to our ability to understand both taxonomic diversity and anatomical diversity,” Whitlock said.
The dinosaur was named “Gnatalie” last month after the museum asked the public to vote on five choices, including Verdi, a derivative of the Latin word for green; Olive, after the small green fruit that symbolizes peace, joy and strength in many cultures; Esme, short for Esmerelda, which is Spanish for emerald; and Sage, an iconic green L.A. plant that also grows in the Natural History Museum’s Nature Gardens.