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Spectacular Armored Dinosaur Found in Imperiled National Monument
The new species lived in what's now southern Utah more than 75 million years ago.
More than 75 million years ago, a plant-eating armored dinosaur lived and died on a lost continent called Laramidia. Now, its remains have been found in southern Utah—in one of the national monuments the Trump Administration is attempting to shrink.
In a study published on Thursday in PeerJ, paleontologists named a new ankylosaurid species, Akainacephalus johnsoni (“Johnson's thorny head”) from fossils found in Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The remains consist of the animal's skull and parts of its skeleton, including its tail club. The dinosaur's most distinctive feature: bony knobs dotting its skull that resemble pyramids.
The dinosaur lived and died on a continent that no longer exists. At the time, an inland sea carved off western North America into