By EFE,
Buenos Aires: A group of Argentine experts has discovered a new deposit of dinosaur fossils, some 130 million-years-old, in the southern province of Neuquen.
The find was made in the town of Las Lajas, paleontologist Rodolfo Coria, the head of the Carmen Funes Museum, said Monday. The scientist is working with a team from the Municipal Museum.
“The important thing is that we’ve got a deposit in the Bajada Colorada formation, from the Lower Cretaceous period, that is to say, the most ancient that exists,” he said, as reported by the government’s Telam news agency.
Coria said the deposit is located near Las Lajas, “where no indications of the presence of dinosaurs existed”, and he added that he felt “the site is one of enormous potential”.
“We’ve found a lot of fossil material from dinosaurs in that area and up to now we’ve been able to recover part of one of them,” he said.
“We’ve found very informative material and we will (examine it) in the next few months, during which time we will look for anatomical characteristics that allow us to propose a new species of dinosaur,” he added.
Coria said that the team found “just one hind foot, part of an arm and a pair of vertebrae” from an ornithopod about 5 to 6 meters long.