Plentiful fossils of dinosaur contemporary allow population study

Abstract

Dinosaurs ruled the earth for hundreds of millions of years, then disappeared so completely that to find even a partially complete skeleton of a single multi-ton animal is rare. Meanwhile, the Virginia Museum of Natural History has scores of fossils of Tanytrachelos ahynis, a 12- to 18-inch reptile that also lived millions of years ago at the same time as the earliest dinosaurs.