One of the most interesting bone fragments recovered from the Jurassic lake shoreline sediment samples collected in 2008 is a small cervical (neck) vertebra. The tiny neck vertebra is as long as your finger is wide. The entire animal would have been small – an annual hatchling perhaps that was approximately 35 cm in length from snout to tail.
The vertebra was found in a thin sandstone layer containing many thick fish scales and teeth of small freshwater sharks. The neck vertebra is one of the latest bones of dinosaurs recovered from the Jurassic lakeshore site.
The specimen will be deposited in the collections of the Nova Scotia Museum once the written report is published. Thank you to Deborah Skilliter for her help with museum records management.
Pangaea began to break apart 200 million years ago. The area that is now the Bay of Fundy was ripped apart and sank down to form a rift basin. Water from rivers carried sand and pebbles into the lowland area. Over millions of years the sand began to fill the rift basin and the sand eventually turned to sandstone. Sometimes, the sand would bury a dinosaur skeleton, and preserve it as a fossil. Today, researchers find these dinosaur bones, and study them as part of the Earthquake Dinosaurs projects.